36

In the end there is just a room.

Mina lies there dying. She is one hundred and two years old. At a hundred she has received her telegram from the Queen.

‘So even the high-ups notice me now. God save the Queen, save her from old age, it’s not a nice thing, but she still has her husband beside her. No, not beside, he has to walk behind. I should ever have asked my Louis to let me take the lead he wouldn’t have known what to say. But you know I was born in another country and we had a tsar and look what happened to him, you should not count on your luck never running out. Even if you are Queen of England.’

The next year she is less coherent. She sees the Queen’s face on postage stamps, the crisply waved hair, the crown, the necklace. ‘Who is this one?’

Her stomach is swollen. She moans and touches it. Sometimes she cries. The doctor says the family must be called, she is approaching her grand finale. Mary Malley, who takes the bus in from Garston every day, a humble emptier of bedpans and turner of bodies prone to bedsores, says, no, there’s more life left in the old lady yet. She claims to have second sight, sees things others cannot make out. Through the veil of so-called existence Death is always waiting but he has not yet come for Mina. He is sitting on the back step, but she hasn’t invited him in. ‘With some people Death doesn’t get it all his own way,’ she says; ‘he’ll have to hang on a bit longer, polishing his fingernails.’

And she is right. It goes on for several days, and they are long days and nights. Sometimes the light returns to Mina’s eyes. She is still capable of coherent thoughts, but she cannot utter them.

I was no Queen Esther.

When you lose your zest, your excitement for living, you are nobody.

Why do I have to be an old lady, what happened to me?

The TV flickers with the forms of couples looking for an escape to the country. They speak of fields and cottages and lanes and walks and friendly pubs and village greens and express their ambition to breed llamas. Mina takes this in distantly, remembers what Andrievs said about trees.

The trees know exactly what to do, they have all their wisdom in their wood.

She still doesn’t know what he meant by it. A tree is a tree, it just stands there, she has never learned to tell the difference between an oak and an ash, not by the leaves or by the bark.

Her middle child, Benny, arrives from his beach-front home in Israel, a short, tanned, suspicious man in an open-necked shirt. He has been there since 1956, married a local girl, has grandchildren in the army. Every morning when the sun is rising, and before heat crushes the land, he and his wife go for a power walk along the sand, an army of fit, brown, wrinkled retirees. Now he has come as quick as he can, driving recklessly fast to the airport through rumours of another war. On the radio the American president is banging the drum. This time Iraq is the enemy. They must be prepared for missile attack from the air because everybody knows the tyrant has weapons of mass destruction. He needs to come now, before the airspace is closed. He hasn’t seen his mother for ten months and he is not going to miss the last opportunity to kiss her and hold her hand. Of all the children he has the least complicated relationship with her. He loves her unconditionally, ‘She gave me life, what more can a person ask for?’

The three children of Mina Phillips sit in Matron’s office with Dr. Collier, who struggles to deliver bad news in a palatable way. He is a young man who is just settling in to his new practice, which includes in its catchment area this home and all its inhabitants. He is ascending the sharp face of gerontology. He wishes he did not have to take death home every night to his wife and two children. His clothes smell of it.

‘I have to tell you that your mother is very weak, she has almost no resistance to the slightest infection. In my profession we call pneumonia the old man’s friend, and the old woman’s, too, but it’s taking its time. It’s dawdling.’

She is in pain, she moans in discomfort. She reminds him of an animal ready to be put down. What words she comes out with are a mishmash of English and Yiddish, language broken into unintelligible syllables of two tongues, clouds of gas from another world.

He tries to explain what he wants to do but they don’t want to hear. Yes, there is an injection he could give her, this is what he wants to administer, its purpose is pain relief, he must be very clear about that, it will make her comfortable and at peace. He lays out what he wants to give her and what it will do.

‘But that’s heroin,’ Benny says, alarmed, ‘you’ll turn her into a junkie.’

‘Too late for that.’

He explains she will be comfortable and pain-free. This is the important thing. They can sit with her if they wish, some relatives sing, others tell stories, reminiscence or just hold their loved one’s hand. Or they can go home and wait for a phone call. It’s their decision. They must do what they think is best. Their mother is past deciding.

Benny, who prides himself on knowing what’s what, spades called by their right names, says, ‘Am I hearing this right? You’re asking us to give you permission to kill our mother? Our own flesh and blood? What kind of place is this? How many have you bumped off already? Because everyone should admit that our mother is going to live forever and good luck to her.’

The doctor says, ‘Let me put it another way—’

Harry interrupts. The doctor knows him as a local businessman of good reputation and an organiser of generous tombola prizes to the home’s garden parties from Jewish shops. Once there was a side of beef, another time a portable television, driving lessons, a jewelled evening handbag.

‘Now I’m not one to throw around accusations, I dare say this is all standard medical practice and in the old days it was a pillow over the face, kinder in the long run when you had no drugs to give them, but to ask us for permission? It feels to me like a rusty gate in the mind what you’re asking from us. Do you know what I mean?’ He looks round at his brother and sister.

Benny says, ‘Not half.’

Paula, who seems to the doctor the most intelligent of the three, so far has said nothing. He has met her and her husband several times before, a glamorous wealthy couple with the year-round tan that can only come from frequent holidays in the Caribbean. He has them down in his notes as ‘cosmopolitan, flashy, shrewd.’ He’s not aware that there is something a little prejudiced about this assessment. If challenged, he’d say, ‘But it’s true, isn’t it?’

He turns to her, and says, ‘Mrs. Schwartz, what’s your view?’

Putting her on the spot, he recognises, hoping to drive a wedge between her and her brothers. He has seen no evidence in her of the two men’s schmaltzy sentimentality. She sits in the peach-coloured vinyl armchair, her still excellent legs crossed, her skirt an inch or two above the knee and some kind of silk – or is it satin? – blouse in a shade he thinks might be called midnight blue. Self-possessed, well preserved by the application of cosmetic surgery and expensive dentistry. Smoking a gold-filtered cigarette without having asked permission.

Paula hasn’t spoken for good reason. She can tell that they are going to put it all on her, relying on her to make the decision. Then they can blame her. Paula made us do it.

Last year Paula had been forced to acknowledge that yes, she herself is in her seventies, because Mina keeps saying, ‘Look at us, two old ladies, whoever would have thought we would have that in common?’

And that reminds Paula that she, too, is on the helter-skelter, that in a few years, even a silk scarf concealing a ruined neck will not be enough. That she will be infirm, incontinent, trouble with her legs, her eyes, her bladder, her bowels, everything decaying, going wrong, unfixable. Then the unthinkable, death, which is about to happen to her mother, meaning, if they go in order, Harry is next, then Benny, then herself. What a line to have to stand in. She can’t bear it. So she, too, harbours the illusion that her mother will not die.

To try to narrow the gap between them, Paula had brought her mother a lipstick, a scarf, a vial of perfume, anything to make her look younger – ‘Just freshening you up, Mummy’ – and Mina had started to enjoy the vanity, to say, ‘Paula gets me the latest of everything.’

She had also brought news of her own daughter Shelley who is mother to Zoë Fletcher, this uninterrupted line of daughters, each less Jewish than the last. Paula, who speaks like a BBC announcer, and is rumoured among the younger housewives of the community to have had an actual fling with a BBC announcer in her wilder days, is still a recognisable suburban Jewish type. She wears gold swimming jewellery, for a start, which makes Shelley blush to think about. Shelley went in for the law, is now a silk, which is to say, a top barrister. She has always been of an argumentative disposition, which her father says is a Jewish trait, for disputation is the essence of Judaism.

‘No, it’s not,’ Shelley replied.

She lives in a narrow, tall, old house in London with her second husband, Mike Harris, while still on good terms with her first, Eddie Fletcher, whose name she has given to her daughter, while staying Schwartz herself. She goes to dinner parties with the Prime Minister, she knows law lords and the Director of Public Prosecutions. There has been a big interview with her in one of the national papers with a photograph of her in her barrister’s wig, seated on a stool at her quartz kitchen island. Paula brought the paper in to show her mother. But Mina, who can no longer tell the difference between her granddaughter and the Queen, dropped it on the floor, like a baby in its highchair learning the difference between here and there.

Paula knows that Shelley thinks she is difficult and eccentric and shallow. She reads, she reads all the time, but Shelley says, ‘Only novels.’ She reads Philip Roth and Saul Bellow and Margaret Atwood. She likes best the American Jewish big-hitters, energy like a boiler firing on the very first page. When Shelley speaks of books, she means non-fiction: footnotes, an index and a bibliography. Paula had warned her against Eddie Fletcher, her first husband. ‘Men like him have a clock where they should have a heart.’

But Shelley had cried, ‘Mum, at least he has principles.’

‘Really? They won’t keep you warm in bed.’

When Zoë was born, Paula said, looking at the babe in her all-white knitted clothes, ‘Let’s see what her story is.’

Between each generation there has been misunderstanding. Paula feels like the January god of the Romans who faces in both directions. Each way she looks there are difficult women. One of the last coherent sentences her mother has spoken was this: ‘I always was on the side of the underdog, but what does it mean when the underdog doesn’t like you?’

Paula remembers the kitchen in the old house on Brownlow Hill, the drying clothes hanging from the pulley, old songs, ‘schlof mein maydele schlof.’ Then the wireless, the very English voices, the correctness of vowels, the modulation of consonants, the sense that there was an external authority which applies outside the walls of their home, and her mother did not care or know about it, because here in the kitchen was steam and safety and cooking smells, and sometimes her mother was standing by the door all dressed up, in a pair of white kid gloves, and her father with his hat in his hand and his face turned to his zaftig wife. But after Louis died she gave up keeping a kosher home, the separate pots and pans and china and cutlery, ‘all a load of hooey.’ So what, Paula wonders, was she really thinking all those years?

Still, whatever else was going on in her head, Mina knew how to be a mother but Paula had never learned the trick of it. Shelley, in the years to come, given the possibility of what is obviously a lethal injection, would probably say, ‘Go right ahead.’

‘Go home,’ Dr. Collier says, ‘talk it over. Ask your children, ask your friends. Ring me any time, I’m always available, I’ll tell reception to put you straight through and if I’m at home leave a message. I want you to know I had a great admiration for your mother, she was one of the real characters of this place, the stories she told, I never knew what to believe and what was her imagination.’

‘All true,’ says Benny, truculent, prickly, ‘she never told a lie in her life. Don’t you go accusing her of being a liar. She was as honest as the day was long.’

‘Of course, of course, I didn’t mean … but you must understand, the world she came from, it seems like a fairy tale to me, forests, wolves … Where did she come from, by the way? I always thought it must be somewhere in Russia. We never had a copy of her birth certificate on file.’

‘She never had a birth certificate, as far as I know,’ Harry says. ‘Or if she did it was lost long ago, or they never brought it with them, they left in a hurry. She came from Latvia, Riga, the capital, a real city, I’m told, with her brother, olavasholam, who passed away in here a few years ago. Before your time. We wanted to go, look around the place, see where it all started, but it was hard to get into, or it was then. Things are different now, I hear.’

‘All in the past,’ says Benny. ‘Long gone now. And all we have left of that generation is our Mummy.’

‘Was there any significance in the red scarf she always wore?’

The care workers tied it round her neck every morning; in the last weeks she has put the points into her mouth and sucked them so they had to hide it. The dye could come out and poison her. She would look around the room for a lost object and point to her neck. ‘My schmatte,’ she would say. ‘Where is it?’

It reminds Paula of her baby daughter’s piece of blanket, the loss of which on Formby sand dunes, fallen out of her pushchair, was possibly the founding trauma of Shelley’s life. Paula had tried cutting another piece of blanket but Shelley said it did not smell the same: of herself and her bedclothes, and spilt milk. ‘I don’t want it,’ she had wept. And had learned to live without it. Paula told the care workers to give Mina back the scarf, let her die with that rag rightfully round her neck, whatever it meant to her.

‘Oh, yes, there was significance, as you put it,’ says Harry. ‘You won’t know this but in the old days she used to hand out leaflets for the Communist Party. On our road, full of dentists and custom house officials! They probably went straight in the bin, this was all before recycling. Don’t forget she had that picture of Stalin on the mantelpiece during the war. What a moustache that man had, still gives me the willies thinking about it. What did she mean by Stalin, what could anyone mean? I’m lucky to be born an Englishman. It could all have been so much worse. Paula, what’s your opinion? Was she really a Red?’

‘I think it was mainly an affectation,’ Paula says, who finally feels that her tongue is loosening, having been a stick of wood in her mouth. ‘How far she believed in it all, I’ve no idea. I suspect it was all bound up with her vanity, wanting to remember she had once been a young girl, that old story of the forest, which must have had some truth in it, a germ of truth, but obviously embroidered. Anyway, by the seventies she had turned against Russia and began to campaign for Soviet Jewry when that was in fashion. By that time she had found out her little sister’s fate but she didn’t know what happened to her brother Solly, still doesn’t. Then there was the other brother—’

‘Itzik, that mamzer.’

‘Oh, stop it, you never knew him.’

‘I didn’t want to know him. Look what he nearly did to you.’

‘I didn’t end up so badly off.’

‘Doctor,’ says Harry, giving his brother and sister a not-in-front-of-the-goyem look, ‘my mother meant the world to us. Nothing will ever replace a mother’s love. She was unpredictable, I agree, a very complicated woman. I never understood her and I won’t for as long as I live. A film was made about her, did you know that? You want us to end our mother’s life? Well, with that, everything is over. The Liverpool we grew up in is finished, Brownlow Hill has nothing left, and soon the Liverpool we made our own lives in will be over, the beautiful suburbs. You give her this so-called injection and what’s left?’

But eventually, they seem ready to leave, to get in their cars and go to Paula’s house, to drink a cup of tea and refuse a slice of cake, to say, ‘how can anyone eat at a time like this?’ and ‘not a morsel of food will touch my lips,’ to argue, to throw their weight around and claim seniority, to wait for Ringo to get home because he will have an opinion, being a man who could have letters after his name if it hadn’t been for the war and had gone to Berlin and passed the judgement of Solomon on real Nazis.

‘Do you think we should ask your Shelley?’ Harry says to Paula in the lift. ‘There must be laws about this kind of thing. She’ll know.’

Paula briefly thinks about calling her daughter on her mobile telephone, as she has been instructed to do in an emergency. But why put it all on the heads of the next generation? They must find a way out of this situation on their own, it’s their duty.