Philippa had always thought that if one were forced to share a flat it would be easier with a stranger than with a friend. And this stranger was so orderly, so quiet, so undemanding, was accommodating without being subservient, was capable about the flat without being obsessional. It was extraordinary how easily they established their shared routine. Philippa awoke now to sounds and smells that quickly became so familiar that it was difficult to believe that they were new. Her day began with the soft rustle of her mother’s dressing gown, with a cup of tea silently placed on her bedside table. Maurice had occasionally brought up her morning tea at Caldecote Terrace. But that was in another country and, besides, that wench was dead. She prepared their breakfast of cereal and boiled egg while her mother cleaned the flat, and then they sat together over their coffee, map spread, planning each day’s excursions. It was like showing London to a foreign visitor, but one from a different culture, even a different dimension of time, an intelligent, interested tourist whose eyes surveyed the sights presented for her edification with pleasure, sometimes with delight, but who seemed to be looking beyond them, attempting to reconcile each new experience with an alien, half-remembered world. She was a tourist who was wary of the natives; anxious not to draw attention to herself by any solecism of taste; sometimes confused about the currency, mixing the tenpenny and fifty-pence piece; momentarily disconcerted by space and distance. Watching her, Philippa thought: she’s like a woman who suffers simultaneously from claustrophobia and agoraphobia. And she was a visitor whose native country must be thinly populated since she was so frightened of crowds. London was packed with tourists, and although they set out early and avoided the most popular tourists’ resorts, it was impossible to avoid the crush of bodies at bus stops and tube-station platforms, in shops and subways. Either they lived as hermits, or they contributed to and endured the hot, chattering, polluting pressure of humanity, breathed air which, on the warmer airless days, seemed to have been exhaled from a million lungs.
She discovered that her mother liked and had an instinctive appreciation of pictures; it was a discovery, too, for her mother. It pleased her to believe that her own pleasure in painting was inherited, enhanced by, but not the result of Maurice’s careful tutelage. They became almost obsessive tourists during their first week together, setting out early with a packed lunch to be eaten on park seats, on river steamers, on the top deck of a bus, in the secret squares and gardens of the city.
She thought that she knew the exact moment when her mother had voluntarily taken upon herself the burden of happiness. It was the evening of their third day together when they threw the things she had brought with her from Melcombe Grange into the Grand Union Canal. In the morning they had taken a bus to Knightsbridge and had fought their way into one of the sales. Watching her mother’s face as the horde of bodies pressed upon them, Philippa surprised in herself an emotion too close to sadism to be comfortable. They could have shopped perfectly well in Marks and Spencer in Edgware Road, getting there at nine-thirty before the crowd of tourists arrived. Had it been entirely because of a wish to see her mother in expensive clothes that she had led them to this melee? Hadn’t it been in part deliberate, a test of her mother’s courage, perhaps even the half-shameful pleasure of observing with detached interest the physical manifestations of pain and endurance? At the worst moment, the crush at the foot of the escalator, looking at her mother’s face, she had been suddenly afraid that she was going to faint. She had taken her mother by the elbow and urged her forward; but she hadn’t held her hand. Not once, not even in that bleak sitting room at Melcombe Grange had there been a touching of each other’s fingers, a meeting of flesh.
But she had been pleased with their bargains: a pair of fawn linen slacks, a jacket to match in fine wool, two cotton shirts. Trying them on again once they were home, her mother had turned to her with a curious look, half rueful, half resigned, which seemed to ask: “Is this what you want? Is this how you see me? I’m attractive, intelligent, still young. I have to live the rest of my life without a husband, without a lover. So what are these clothes for? What am I for?”
Afterwards she had sat on the bed and watched while her mother packed her case. Everything that she had brought with her from prison went in: the suit in which she had travelled to London, her gloves, her underclothes, her shoulder bag, even her toilet articles and pyjamas. It was an extravagance thus to relinquish even the small necessities of living, all of which would have to be replaced; but Philippa didn’t check her. It was an extravagance necessary to both of them.
They set out for the canal half an hour before the towpath was due to be closed to the public, and walked in silence, her mother carrying the case, until they reached an unfrequented stretch of the path overshadowed by trees. It was a warm, heavy evening of low cloud. The canal, rich and sluggish as treacle, slipped undisturbed under the low bridges and seeped into the moist fringes of the bank. A crowd of midges danced above the water, and single leaves, dark green, still glossy with the patina of high summer, floated slowly past on the sluggish stream. The air was rich with a rank river smell overlaid with loamy earth and spiced with the drifting scent of lawn cuttings and roses from the high gardens above the canal. The birds were silent now, except for the occasional distant cry, plaintive and alien, from the zoo aviary.
Still without speaking, Philippa took the case from her mother and hurled it into the middle of the stream. She had first glanced each way to make sure that the towpath was empty, but even so the splash as the case hit the water sounded so like a falling body that they simultaneously glanced at each other, frightened that someone from the road must have heard. But there were no calling voices, no running footsteps. The case rose slowly, slid along the greasy surface of the water then reared itself like a sinking ship, toppled and was gone. The circle of ripples died.
She heard her mother give a little sigh. Her face, stained by the green shadows, was extraordinarily peaceful. She looked like a woman in a moment of mystical exultation, even of religious ecstasy. Philippa felt an almost physical relief, as if she had flung away something of herself, of her past, not the past which she knew and recognized, but the formless weight of unremembered years, of childhood miseries which were not less acute because they lurked beyond the frontier of memory. They were gone now, gone forever, sinking slowly into the mud. She needn’t bother anymore to try to recall them, nor fear that they might leap out of her subconscious to confuse and terrorize her. She wondered what her mother was thinking, she whose past, seared on so many memories, documented between the buff covers of official files, could not so easily be flung away. They stood in silence at the water’s edge. Then the spell broke. Her mother turned to her. Her face relaxed into a smile like a woman released from pain into peace. It was almost a grin of pleasure. But all she said was: “That’s done. Let’s go home.”