Chasing the Train
ONE EVENING IN 2003 the phone rang and I answered it. Over a bad line, my cousin Victoria said she had a message for my mother from her own mother: Fay was poised to book a flight to England from South Africa and wanted my mother to green-light it. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and walked from the hallway into the living room, where my mother sat in a chair by the window, blanket over her legs, feet poking out of the end in thick woolly socks. Outside in the heat wave the trees towered and loomed. I passed on the message.
“Absolutely not,” said my mother.
She had been off-color for a while. There was a persistent skin irritation that wouldn’t go away, even with antibiotics. She was uncharacteristically listless, then nauseated, and finally breathless. She lost interest in pretty much everything except going out every morning to feed the birds in the garden and reading the newspaper. It took her the best part of a day to get through it.
Much later, my dad and I tried to trace back the symptoms—the tiredness and coughing, the misdiagnoses (asthma, bronchitis)—to work out how long she’d been ill. Well over a year, we thought. Since her mother had died from TB, she’d been confident, when we finally went in for the biopsy, that that’s what it was. I think she was even a little consoled by this, a connection to the woman she had never known and of whom no living person had a single memory. The diagnosis of lung cancer seemed unfair when my mother hadn’t smoked for thirty years.
I took the phone around the corner and in a low voice said to my cousin that Fay’s offer was appreciated but that my mother was too tired for visitors. My cousin disappeared from the line and came back a moment later to say her mother understood. I went back into the living room, passed my mother the phone, and the sisters spoke to each other for a few minutes. Then my mother said good-bye and hung up. I went back into the kitchen to make cocktails.
• • •
WE WERE WORKING our way through the Savoy Hotel Cocktail Book that summer, which is why, for years afterward, I had orange liqueur and Tia Maria and angostura bitters in my cupboard, up there with the baking soda and other things I never use. I’d had an idea we’d start at A and work through, but by mid-June this was looking ambitious. There were too many ingredients and the exercise, conceived of in the absence of any better ideas on how to ritualize the end, threatened to furnish me with a tragic coda at the funeral: “We only got to Sea Breezes!” (An epitaph she would have loved, by the way.)
Because I was in charge, my mother drank from a glass. Left to her own devices, she would drink from a washed-out old yogurt pot, silver foil still stuck to the rim. It was the kind of ostentatious economy she loved, right up there with reusing unfranked stamps or folding a single sheet of loo paper in half. She poured her first yogurt pot at nine in the morning.
“Here,” I said, handing her a White Russian.
“Cheers.”
We sat and looked out through the living-room window. Every now and then the breeze would lift and a great hiss and surge of light seemed to fill every wavelength.
“It’s so peaceful,” she said. “It’s so peaceful here.”
When my dad came in from work, she looked up and smiled. “Go and change.”
• • •
THERE WAS SOMETHING we were supposed to be doing, during those dozy afternoons and long, empty mornings, which we had emphatically been failing to do. My mother always said that, given the choice, she would rather go down the long, slow decline route than be run down by a bus. That way, when the time came, she’d have had a chance to have put her affairs in order. But now we were here and it wasn’t appealing. It seemed absurd at this stage to ruin what time we had left with painful and long-avoided subjects, although “what time we had left” was a cliché we were finding hard to make meaningful. I had taken semileave from work, and the sense of time running out had been replaced with the peculiar drag of being home on a weekday, with its echo of sick days off school. It felt like this period would go on in slow motion forever.
“Is there anything you want to do today?” I asked in the morning, and my mother’s eyes flitted.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
In the evening, another phone call, another sister three thousand miles away. This one didn’t offer to visit. “Sensible woman,” said my mother.
We were trying to be disciplined about crackpot remedies. Some free reflexology at the hospital, a rosary I bought in Camden Passage for a joke. In a moment of weakness, I’d been to the health food store for pills that promised to restore a full head of hair in record time.
“Do I have to?” she’d said when I handed her one. I was horrified. My mother loved nothing better than to contrive a minor discomfort for herself, for the pleasure she got from overcoming it. “Too many pills,” she said in a small voice.
“Of course you don’t have to,” I said briskly, and packed them away.
Every morning, either my dad or I—whichever of us had slept overnight in the downstairs bedroom in the single bed next to hers—helped her up and we hobbled through the kitchen to the living room. At lunchtime, I maneuvered her into the car and we drove the two blocks to the high street, where we sat in the window of the Chinese restaurant. We’d been going there for years; my mother always asked after the owner’s children. The place was empty, and he solicitously and diplomatically took our order.
“I’m surprised it pays them to stay open,” I said.
“Yes.”
For a change, one day I drove us to a pub halfway between our village and the next. We used to go there for a treat on the last day of school. Under-twelves weren’t allowed in, but my mother said if I was quiet, no one would object. We’d stopped going when they changed beer suppliers to a brand she didn’t like and the ham in the ham sandwiches went from dry-cured (right) to honey-glazed (wrong), so this was a sentimental gesture, of sorts. We sat in the garden.
“Beats working, doesn’t it?” called my mother to the couple at the next table. It was the hottest day of the year so far and she looked startling in a heavy wool jacket, a black skullcap—which she preferred to a wig—and a red T-shirt I had given her with Che Guevara on the front. The couple turned in alarm. Tormenting the English was one of my mother’s favorite pastimes, but there was something off in her tone that day; it had none of the usual archness—was almost beseeching—and where normally I would have cringed, I thought, “Answer her, you fuckers.”
“Yes,” they said, eventually. My mother turned away and, relaxing for a moment, tilted her face skyward as a flower tracks the sun. “Lovely,” she said. After lunch, we crossed the garden in a feat of horizontal rock-climbing: table to chair to wall to drainpipe, into the pub and across endless carpeted space to the toilet. “Phew!” said my mother, hanging on to the door handle. “I thought we’d never make it.”
• • •
I DROVE US BACK the long way. Down the road that ran parallel to the railway, which we had driven down to school every day for ten years. When we coincided with a train, she’d speed up to race it until I squealed and made her slow down again. Up the hill, along the lane by St. Mary’s, past the RAF base, and then I pulled in at a place where I used to go swimming. We sat in the car in front of a squat 1970s building.
“Do you remember . . . ?” I said.
“Yes,” she said vaguely. I had the sense she was indulging me.
In the evening, I sat beside her in the living room, holding her hand. “Look,” I said. There was a pattern on one of her fingernails, a corrugated effect like the ghost of an old infection. “Is that a new thing?”
“I don’t know,” said my mother. “Funny.”
“I’ll get us another drink.” She smiled at me.
“If anyone tries to stop you, call a policeman.”
If the first cocktail didn’t work, I reverted to rum and Coke. After two rounds I started to scale back the measures. We got stuck on piña coladas for a week before tiring of them. The margaritas came out like lighter fuel. But the White Russians were perfect, the Kahlua thick and syrupy, the texture of cough medicine. When I poured in the milk, it came up, like sludge, from the bottom of the glass.
• • •
MY MOTHER WAS SITTING on a stool at the kitchen table. I was standing behind her, rubbing lavender oil into what remained of her hair. It had come back a little curly and appeared now in fine gray swirls on her scalp, like a weather map depicting a hurricane. As I applied the oil, I saw the strawberry birthmark at her hairline. “Stimulates regrowth” is what it said on the bottle, but it was just a nice sensation. I had to stop it from flooding the neck of her jersey.
“Lovely,” she said.
There was no preamble. It appears in my memory out of nowhere, as it had the first time, although on this occasion my mother’s voice was less harsh. When all else failed, she said, she had her father arrested. The case had gone to the High Court. He had defended himself and cross-examined his own children in the witness box, destroying them one by one. He had been found not guilty. She didn’t say what the charge was, beyond that the action was triggered by a pattern repeating itself. What had happened to her had been happening to her sister Fay, the one she called her baby, and she wouldn’t stand for it any longer. My mother was twenty-four; her sister was twelve. She gave me the last of the heavy-weather looks, a worn-out version of her old favorite, Woman of Destiny Considers Her Life. I managed to squeak out a question this time: how was he found not guilty?
My mother looked bitter and by way of an answer repeated something the prosecutor had said to her about her stepmother: “If that woman isn’t careful, I’ll have her up as an accessory.” She had lied in the witness box or retracted her statement; some kind of U-turn that contributed to the collapse of the case. The prosecutor was furious with her, said my mother.
After the verdict, her father had come up to her in the courtroom and, grinning, said, “Aren’t you proud of me?” My mother said it was the most shocking moment of her life.
• • •
SHE HAD GONE BACK to her apartment and had tried to decide what to do. She had dragged her siblings through a horrifically public ordeal, which had failed. She had been personally defeated. The worst thing about it, she said, was worrying that people at work would find out. It had been in the newspapers.
It occurred to her that she had two options: to carry on living, or to kill herself. We sat side by side at the kitchen table. I put my head on my arm. In an odd way, I was less disturbed by the information itself than by the fact of its eleventh-hour revelation. It seemed to me incredible that, behind all those hints and intimations, all those years of comic threats and camp overreactions that I had come to see, more or less, as a flourish of character, an actual solid event had existed. Occasionally over the years I had wondered which would be worse: to discover that something terrible had happened, or that not very much had happened at all and that either my mother or I had concocted a drama from nothing. As she spoke, a tiny part of me was relieved that neither of us had turned out to be mad.
I was also incredulous. Deathbed revelations weren’t something people had. That my mother, who would ring me at work with the news flash that she’d found the socks she was looking for, that the thermal vests she’d ordered for my dad had arrived, that a woman we knew slightly had walked past the house and her ankles were huge, and whom I rang back with the news I’d had tuna for lunch, had managed to keep this from me was extraordinary.
There was no time to think about it. I knew, dimly, that it would come back at some stage and demand to be thought about. But right then, alongside the daily effort of not looking forward, not looking back was relatively easy. Only once, and for a second, did I have any real understanding of what she had told me—that to her this was not an ancient grievance, easily back-burnered. It was a few days later. She was walking through the door from the kitchen to the hallway. A thought occurred to her in that instant that she articulated to me, sitting at the kitchen table, and that in the face of stiff competition still constitutes I think the most shocking moment of my life.
She looked at me and said, with something like surprise and as if it had only just occurred to her, “I think I have come to terms with it.” Not “came,” but “have come.” As if, in all those years of village life, in the market, at the tennis club, in the midst of our mild existence, a process had been ongoing, another reality alive to her in which she’d been wholly alone.
• • •
FOR THE SPACE of an afternoon she had sat in her flat and weighed up her options. If she lived, she said, she had to be sure she could meet two conditions: one, that she would never be intimidated again; and two, that she would be happy. She may very well have done this. But—and I knew this instantly—the recollection had a tailored quality to it that suggested the scene had been worked on. It bore all the hallmarks of my mother’s philosophy: that it’s not what happens to you that matters so much as the story you choose to tell afterward—even if the only person you tell is yourself.
A few days later I asked her, as a joke, if there were any skeletons in the closet. She gave the appearance of thinking about it. “No,” she said, and tilting her face upward launched her most theatrically innocent look. “I don’t think so.” Oh, God.
She died at 7:20 p.m. on a warm summer evening, in the downstairs guest bedroom of our house. All that talk of “putting one’s affairs in order” had fallen away to this: “You and your dad must stick together.” I had told her we would. She had tried, then, to counsel me about her own death. “You’ll be sore afterward . . .” This was too much, even for my mother, and she looked away. I was furious that she should even try such a thing, such a piece of existential masochism, just as I’d been furious when, well into her illness and unsteady on her feet, she had insisted on going out every morning to feed the birds. I had wanted to scream at her, “Stop it, it’s over, you can’t bluff your way through this one.” Then she had stopped going out and complained of being in pain, and I longed for the old bravado.
She was adamant that no one should come to the funeral; just my dad and me and the woman from the Humanist Society who, when she visited a few days after the death, seemed taken aback by the stringency of my mother’s wishes. My dad and I wavered. There were my mother’s friends from London; there were the parents of my own friends, who’d become her friends; there were neighbors and friends from the village. All summer they’d dropped in with offers of help: portable fans to disperse the heat, ideas on how to tempt her appetite. We owed them a funeral. An elderly woman called Hazel whom I knew by sight but had never spoken to stopped me in the street and asked if I needed help going through my mother’s wardrobe. “It can be hard,” she said. We got all the way to Hazel, buoyed by the idea we were doing the right thing, before stopping and helplessly scrapping the list.
The humanist looked at me. (I thought she’d be woollier, but she was actually quite stern. “Mum would have liked her,” we said afterward, hopefully.) It’s not that she didn’t have friends, I said. It’s that she didn’t want . . . she didn’t like the idea of people gathering in these circumstances. I knew exactly how my mother felt about this: that being the only dead person in the room would put her at a decided disadvantage.
Mr. Quigley, the undertaker, had come for her that night in formal dress, accompanied by his daughter, who was very young and very grave, wearing what looked like a man’s black suit and standing behind her father, staring respectfully at her shoes. The undertaker had explained we might want to wait in the living room and shut the door; the removal of the body could be upsetting.
My dad and I did as he instructed, milling awkwardly in the middle of the room. Her glasses were still on the windowsill, on top of a paperback she’d been reading, a shiny-backed crime novel from the library. Twenty-seven versions of my own face stared down at me from the Shrine. There was a sharp bump against the door. Something in my brain lifted up and resettled. The turn from the hallway to the porch was tight and I couldn’t imagine how they’d make it, or how two slight-looking people, an old man and a girl, could manage the load. (Mr. Quigley may not have been old, but that’s how he seemed, in his gentle formality.)
We opened the door and went out into the hallway. The porch opened onto the warm summer night. Mr. Quigley and his daughter reemerged from the darkness, and when we shook their hands, I noticed the girl’s watch, which was huge, like something you’d wear to go diving. “My mother will be fascinated by all this,” I thought.
On the day of the funeral it started to rain, the first rain of summer. “Hammy to the end,” I thought. We honored her wishes and kept the guest list to two.