One minute Louis is sitting in the lounge with the evening paper on his lap watching Coronation Street, reaching towards the bowl of sweets on the nest of tables, next he is on his knees on the floor crying, Help me, someone help me. The heart has a blockage, the heart is in trouble. An ambulance ride to Sefton General, an iron bed frame bound tight with sheets and blankets, hospital pyjamas, a bottle of Lucozade on the bedside table. He looks pale and startled; he dislikes the aesthetic of his surroundings. The nurses – Irish, beefy and practical; the doctors matter-of-fact remote faces. If only he had his burgundy silk dressing gown with the tasselled belt and at the very least some clean Marks & Spencer pyjamas. Then he can recuperate with dignity in the Nightingale ward full of coughers and wheezers and moaners. Then he can be himself: Louis Phillips Esq. of Acme Chamois Leathers, who combs Grecian formula through what remains of his hair; whose business has survived the downturn when others have gone under and even his very successful son-in-law got a bit of a fright for a few months and had to close down two shops.
In Sefton General Louis did not think he was going to die and Mina did not think he was going to die but the place gave him the willies; maybe he would be better off going private, they could afford it. There was discussion about being transferred to a convalescent home over the water, run by kindly, experienced nuns. Ringo brought in a brochure. ‘Top notch,’ he said. ‘Beautiful gardens, good food, views of the sea from some of the rooms. A couple of weeks there and you’ll be back on your feet.’ But Louis didn’t like the look of the place, the nuns in their long black dresses and white wimples, the bedrooms each with a wooden Jesus bleeding wooden blood above the bed.
No, he would recover at home. ‘My wife will look after me,’ he told the doctor. ‘And I have wonderful children and grandchildren.’ But the doctor insisted he must stay in hospital a while longer.
‘Make me look a mensch, please, Mina,’ he said. ‘You know what I’m after. The silk dressing gown from Simpsons. And when I get out of here, maybe we can take up ballroom dancing.’ Because that’s what he’s overheard one of the nurses say to a fellow three beds along. You’ll soon be back on your feet and doing the foxtrot. Why shouldn’t he and Mina take up a hobby now he is semi-retired and Harry pretty much running the whole show? Exercise is important, he’s been told. He must give up his cigars, start playing golf, be his own caddie. And he has always been light on his feet so he sees a future for them doing ballroom classes and taking to the dance floor at weddings. Showing off. And why not?
‘And what about in the bedroom?’ he asked the consultant. ‘Do I have to take it easy there?’ He managed a slow wink.
‘There’s exercise, and there’s exertion. We will have to have a man-to-man chat about it when you’re discharged. We’ll leave it at that, for now.’ And hurried away down the ward, escaping smells and sick bodies and unemptied bedpans.
Louis remembered the teenage girl he had courted in his best suit and bowler hat, red carnation in his buttonhole. Sometimes he looked at Mina and here she was, a tangle of dark hair, currant eyes, a mischievous expression. Sometimes she was an old lady with thick ankles and hands distorted by arthritis. Her neck had collapsed in, a flap of loose skin wobbled below her chin like a turkey gobbler’s throat. He didn’t understand the passage of time, if the Minas were the same person or she had been usurped by an imposter. If she went first, who would be left who remembered him as a young man with light brown hair? For he felt, against all the odds, in this hospital bed, looking round the ward at the old men, that he was not one of them, did not belong here; that he was going to live forever.
Mina said, sitting by his bed with half a pound of grapes in a paper bag in her lap, ‘You’ve had a lucky break. But like Ringo says, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ She saw their old age together with great clarity: comfortable in each other’s company, bickering, fussing over their grandchildren, spoiling them. ‘And we could go back to Cannes; do you remember the time we stayed at the Martinez and we saw that Arab sheik arrive and that slave or whatever he was crawling backways in front of him?’
‘Will I ever forget it? What can you do with people like that? But they have the oil and oil is king these days.’
‘I know, in our day it used to be coal and factories and electricity.’
For a few days Louis lay in all his pomp in his silk dressing gown with his Reader’s Digest condensed books, his grapes, his Lucozade, his tentative conversations with the other patients, the pleasurable sight of the young nurse straight off the boat from Cork last month who gave him a sponge wash and he tried not to get an erection as she felt under his armpits with her soapy water.
Where was she when, in the middle of the night, he had another coronary? In the nurses’ station reading a magazine.
‘In a hospital,’ Harry said, who was in a mind to sue for medical negligence. ‘What were they all doing while my father was lying there fighting for his life?’
The young nurse cried and went to church to confession and told the priest she had as good as killed a man while she was reading an article about David Essex.
In the afternoon, Matron handed back to Mina the silk dressing gown and M&S pyjamas wrapped in brown paper and string.
‘I gave that nurse a man, she gave me back a parcel,’ she said to Paula, for it was a universal truth among widows that hospitals took husbands and returned them as something you put in the post.
She went home on the bus with Louis in her shopping bag to an empty house. Hung his dressing gown back up on the bathroom door. From the toilet seat she thought any moment he might turn and say, ‘Mina, will you be long? I’m desperate for a wee.’ Such a romantic, my husband’s ghost, she thought.
Now she was in sole possession of three bedrooms, a lounge, a dining room, a morning room, a kitchen, a matching bathroom suite, a garden with a locked shed for which the key had been long lost, a disused coal hole and a garage with Louis’ car in it which she couldn’t drive and would give to Harry for his youngest daughter who was taking lessons.
She had never lived alone. From her father’s house with brothers and sister and maids, to Brownlow Hill, two families under one roof. To Allerton and three children messily growing up together. To her and Louis watching the telly together in the evenings. To silence. Where a spoon left out on the countertop and an unwashed mug in the sink were still there when she came home from shopping, untouched. There were only so many times you could wipe the Formica counter, straighten the cutlery in the drawers, dust the ornaments, clean the oven, hoover the carpets, polish the Friday-night silver candlesticks, rearrange the crockery so the patterns matched. By the time Coronation Street finished she was in her nightie and dressing gown and slippers. She was watching the mantelpiece clock until the hands reached nine and she could go up the stairs to a bed warmed for half an hour by the electric blanket. She cleansed her face with cold cream, brushed her teeth, kissed the shoulder of Louis’ dressing gown and trailed the hem along her fingers. Then the boxer’s knock-out blow of sleep.
Her children took it in turns to have her for Friday night dinner. Ringo had hired an architect, not a run-of-the-mill jobbing builder, to present his wife with a modernist plate-glass mansion behind the Allerton allotments, a house of dreams. She had a dressing room and a walk-in closet. He had a room for his cigars. Under his energetic direction he had expanded the family schmatte business to a chain of boutiques extending from Liverpool across to the wealthier suburbs of Cheshire. They had a daughter they named Shelley. From the sixties to the late eighties they went every year to the Caribbean. Ringo grew his hair over his collar, they became vacation hippies, dressed in sarongs and smoked grass, returning home deeply tanned, relaxed, ready to place new orders with Mary Quant, Ossie Clarke, Foale and Tuffin. Paula and Ringo ate steak tartare and salads. They had introduced into their kitchen the concept of an hors d’oeuvre avocado pear, its hollow swimming with a pool of vinaigrette, eaten with a teaspoon. They were modern people who held dinner parties. Now Paula made chopped liver, chicken soup, roast chicken, stewed apple to tempt her mother’s appetite.
To Paula, the sight of her mother sitting behind her plate, barely touching her food (and really, it wasn’t that bad) brought out in her the rash urge to take on the role of being a parent to her parent. Which was bound to end badly, she didn’t have that kind of touch. But as Paula insisted, ‘Somebody had to do something, and if I hadn’t stepped up I’d have got the blame anyway.’
For though she had been worried about her mother’s depression, she had thought at first it would pass. Years after she had last seen Roland she had begun to take an interest in psychology. Mina, she reminded Ringo, had not been able to mourn the deaths of her own mother and father. It was years before she learned the fate of her little sister in that terrible camp. Nobody had known graves and she must have been sublimating all the sadness and uncertainty for decades. What she needed was closure, the stone setting that would finally seal the graves and memorialise an internalised trauma.
But before that could take place Paula had been shopping in Hargreaves when she had overheard one of her mother’s friends, Hettie Chalkin, say, ‘It’s been seven months since Louis Polack died and Mina has to realise that there are newer widows than her, she needs to get over herself.’ Then noticing Paula enquiring whether the shop stocked olive oil, she quickly said, ‘Have you got trouble with your ears?’
Paula, putting a drumstick onto her mother’s plate, said, ‘Mummy, have you considered Valium?’
‘Yes, the whole world takes Valium!’ said Ringo, who had not swallowed any of the happy pills himself. ‘It’s like penicillin, but for your mind. A wonder drug.’
‘Drugs?’ Mina said. ‘You’d know all about that, Paula.’
‘Not those kind of drugs. You get them from the doctor, on prescription.’
‘What do doctors know? I gave them a husband, they gave me back a parcel.’
‘Yes, Mummy, but you mustn’t keep saying that, it’s started to get boring. I don’t mean to us, I mean to other people, your friends. You know there are plenty of widows who throw themselves into activities, you could—’
‘I never did an activity in my life and I’m not starting now. I was too busy bringing up three children. That was your father’s department, going to see his pictures and taking you with him and look where that led.’
‘Okay, Mummy, if I come to the doctor with you will you at least give the Valium a try?’
Mina wanted to say no, but it was not easy to stand up to the combined might of her daughter and son-in-law, who led the good life and were talking about digging down below the foundations to install a swimming pool. Ringo had saved her daughter from a false start. She could not have wanted for a better son-in-law, a man whom everyone liked. And gave his wife everything she had ever wanted. A dishwashing machine. A powder-blue Jaguar convertible. An emerald eternity ring. How could you say no to him?
Mina had always been a restless woman, quick in her actions, busy on her feet, impatient reading a book or watching television. She would get up on a sudden impulse and put on her coat, tie a headscarf round her hair and run out of the house for a walk in Childwall woods. Not deterred by a flasher showing her his gross pink thing held plumply in his hand, smiling at her, and she had shouted, ‘I’ve seen bigger and better than that in the forest, believe you me.’
Now she sat. She sat with her hands in her lap, dead fish-eyed, a head full of cotton wool. Is this supposed to be happiness? she asked herself. What a con. She felt – and struggled for a word which was not in her everyday vocabulary – placid. Uncaring, muffled, she might as well be a corpse. A few times a day, when she could be bothered to stand up from the armchair, she went and looked in the bathroom mirror to check that she still had a reflection. She saw in an unflattering fluorescent light the turkey wattle in her neck, the dewlaps on her chin. Who would look at me now? she thought, thinking of the time her husband-to-be turned up at her doorstep. This is a punishment. But for what? For leaving my mother and father and my little brother and sister? Could be.
Jossel, nearly eighty, completely bald, shabby, content, still in love with his wife, would come round to visit and try to make her laugh. Had she heard the one about—
‘I’m not in the mood for jokes.’
‘All right, let’s talk about old times, remember—’
‘All I have is memories, is this supposed to be a life?’
‘Life is what you make it, Mina.’
‘Like you? Am I supposed now to run off with a young gigolo?’
‘I never said—’
‘Better you never say anything, if you’re going to start.’
‘Start what?’
‘I don’t know. Stop bothering me, I can’t think anymore.’
‘If I’m not welcome, tell me to leave.’
‘I’m glad you have a home to go to, a wife to make you a cup of tea when you get in. What have I got?’
‘Mina, it’s the pills. I have the greatest respect for your son-in-law who gave you such advice but you’re taking poison. If you carry on like this you’ll top yourself. Give them to me, I’ll put them in the bin. You’ll thank me for it when you’re back to your old self.’
‘Maybe you’re right. But I don’t know.’
‘I’m your brother, I only want what’s best for you. Where are they? In the bathroom?’
‘In the cabinet.’
Up there he lifted the toilet seat and pissed painfully and slowly in the bowl. He dropped the bottle’s contents down the pan and flushed. They raced down to the river to pacify the fishes.
At night, the little animals came, snouty, tiny-eyed, they pushed their way out of the bedroom wallpaper. No species she recognised but they were not rats or mice or hamsters, they were particular creatures that lived behind the walls of the suburban semi-detached houses of depressed widows, waiting for a chance. She pulled the blankets over her head. ‘Louis, where are you? What have you let them do to me?’ she cried to the empty twin bed.
In the morning she rang the doctor. Who rang Paula. ‘I think you should go and get her, she’s having withdrawal symptoms. Coming off the pills needs to be done gradually, I told her that when I put her on the prescription, but they forget, these old ladies, and they start hallucinating.’
‘I’m so sorry, Mummy, I accept full responsibility for what’s happened to you. I didn’t know Valium could—’
‘Little animals,’ said Mina. ‘What did I ever have to do with an animal? One time I fancied getting a cat, but my Louis said he wouldn’t have one in the house. He said you have a cat to keep the mice away and a house with mice has got to be unclean in the first place. He was very fastidious, your father. But he had a sweet tooth, did I tell you he was reaching for an Everton Mint when he was struck down?’
‘Mummy, you’re babbling. And why are you wearing Daddy’s dressing gown, you look …’