In Extremis

The conference in Berlin could not have been more different from the conference in Amersfoort. In Amersfoort a group of people had got together to see how they could help other people who suffered from Chronic Pelvic Pain Syndrome. They told embarrassing personal stories or they put themselves on the line, allowing their own pelvic floor to be explored through the anus, or exploring the pelvic floor of others, through the anus. A lot of rubber gloves were used, a lot of lubricant. Participants came away with a heightened awareness of their flesh. They were in the quick of life, groping into blood and bone. At that conference I had but a small walk-on part, as one who has suffered and survived, apparently. And all was paid for by the participants themselves, who wished to improve the service they were offering to their clients.

The 27th Annual Conference of the Society of European Linguists was funded by the European Community. Its participants were all salaried professors from European universities. They delivered papers in order to publish them in the conference proceedings, so as to accumulate points that would improve their chances of promotion, increasing their salaries and hence their pensions. They talked about the semantics of unaccusatives, about metonymy and metaphor in the evolution of phrasal verbs, about datives versus nominatives in early Icelandic, about comparative auxiliary distribution in Germanic and Romance languages.

In short, nothing could have been further from the world of the Amersfoort conference, or indeed from the Claygate Hospice where my mother had vomited blood and breathed her last. I was back in my normal environment. All the same, there was no doubt in my mind that it was because I had spent such a large part of my life in the abstractions of diachronic and synchronic linguistics that I had ended up with the kind of abdominal condition that required anal massage – or at least Dr Sharp thought it did. It was the abstracted, cerebral, mental space I moved in that had left my body so dramatically uncared for. Add to that a marriage which neither partner wished to admit wasn’t working, and you have the perfect pathogenic situation: a live, flesh-and-blood human male, full of spit and spunk, who has been ordered from the earliest age to put aside all carnal affections, even though he knows he cannot put them aside, and to cultivate all things of the spirit, even though he never really believed there was any such thing as the spirit. ‘Spirit is an invented word to cover an invented space,’ I told my colleagues at the 27th conference of European Linguists. ‘Beginning as the innocuous spiritus breath, something absolutely verifiable and physical, observable at any deathbed, for example, or at any childbirth, the word morphed into the metaphysical, vaguely archaic spirit: a hypothesis, a hope, a nothing.’

Why had this happened, I asked? To satisfy a craving for profundity, but also for separation from the contingent world, something that went hand-in-hand with the enhanced inwardness that language had produced. An accident of evolution. You evolved language to make the species more efficient and ended up with something you absolutely hadn’t bargained for – this nonsense of the spirit, this nonsense of renunciation of carnal affection, angels, devils, whatever. ‘The role allotted to archaism then,’ I confidently declared – and I don’t doubt my academic colleagues were quite astonished to hear me making such unsubstantiated and impassioned claims – ‘was that of providing the illusion of a more profound and meaningful space where quite simply there was none.’

At this point I projected the first verse of the great baptismal hymn on a PowerPoint slide, typed in Victorian Gothic to get people in the mood. I would have sung it too, had I had the nerve:

In token that thou shalt not fear

Christ crucified to own,

We print the cross upon thee here,

And stamp thee His alone.

As a child singing this hymn, I confessed to my learned audience, I had had no idea what a token was, or what ‘in token’ meant. Sometimes perhaps I had got ‘token’ mixed up with ‘totem’, which was not as unreasonable as it sounds; the whole dynamic of the text was one of substitution: as a sign of something I want to occur in an invisible world, I draw a symbol in the visible world, a cross on a newborn’s forehead, and to this sign – and, indeed, to this whole murky apparatus of appropriation – archaisms cluster and attach themselves like iron filings around a magnet.

‘The mystification of baptism, and indeed of all religious ceremonies,’ I told the European Linguists, ‘is only made possible by language, preferably old language. In fact as the hymn progresses, the simple outward sign of the baptismal cross is surrounded by expressions whose exact referents largely elude us: ‘to glory in His name’; ‘to blazon on thy front’; ‘to sit thee down on high’. What do these things mean? Archaisms,’ I suggested to my colleagues, ‘create gravity where there is only wishful thinking, nouns where there are only adjectives. Even to call it thinking was wishful.’

I was aware, as I began this talk in the plush lecture hall of the Friedrich Schlegel Conference Centre, Berlin, that I had not had the proper time to prepare it, and that very likely it would come across as superficial and forced. I was aware that three-quarters of my audience were not themselves native speakers of English – perhaps five-sixths, to be more accurate – and hence might not grasp the nuances of the baptismal hymn. I was aware too that many colleagues would have their laptops open and would hardly be listening to what I was saying, since while it is always politic to be present at these conferences, there is no real onus on anyone to pay attention. And the more I got into my subject, focusing on the relation between archaism and belonging, archaism and coercion, the more I was aware that I had simply fallen into the trap of ranting about my own personal issues, while at the same time, oddly, actually avoiding these issues, in that I was ranting rather than confronting them.

Hence it was somewhat to my surprise when, at the end of this mad sermon, I received three whole minutes of solid and enthusiastic applause. Two or three of my colleagues actually stood up, shook the dust off their baggy sweaters and applauded. What exactly I had said at the end of it all I wasn’t even sure myself, and had the whole talk been read back to me, I would very likely have winced. Yet it had gone down well with a qualified audience, perhaps more for its entertainment value than any academic worth, or for the pleasure of having seen a colleague expose his own weaknesses so embarrassingly. In any event, the morning’s chairman stood and beamed and declared that never had the relevance of linguists in the modern world been more forcibly put. He even offered me his hand, something I can’t recall happening at a conference before. I sat down in a sweat.

In bed the night before, in the Görlitzerstrasse, I had promised myself I would leave the conference and return to England as soon as my talk was over. But even as the applause died down, it was evident that I could not do this. I could not simply stand up and go. It was one of those situations where all four speakers of the morning session were sitting on the podium together, and would take questions together at the end of the session. If I wasn’t to be extremely rude, I must stay put and listen to three other talks, each half an hour long, then make some kind of contribution to the debate at the end. I should have foreseen this. Already the next speaker was being introduced in the usual fulsome fashion: this milestone publication, that prize, the other prestigious appointment, etc., etc.

So I would leave the conference at lunchtime, I decided. Officially, of course, I was supposed to be here the full two days, listening to my colleagues’ papers and offering my penny’s worth in the discussions, particularly the final round table. An inaugural speaker is expected to make himself available. That’s why he is well paid. Then there would be the conference dinner. My flight to Madrid was not until the morning after that. But staying two days was out of the question. I had to get back to London. As soon as this morning’s session was over, I would invent some excuse.

The present speaker, meanwhile, a feisty eighty-year-old in bright-red pullover and grey tie, was discussing hieroglyphs in Mesopotamian cultures. Each culture in the Euphrates valley borrowed freely from the others, he said, as far as languages and writing systems were concerned, over a period of many centuries. He wore spectacles on a string that he kept putting on and taking off. I could get Elsa to phone me, I thought, when we were all at lunch together, and pretend I was being called away for some family emergency. The question was – the speaker removed his spectacles to look at the audience – did writers of hieroglyphs distinguish between signs that were new and signs that were old, and did they introduce old signs among the new for certain rhetorical effects that went beyond the symbol’s immediate referent? What excuse, I wondered, would be most credible? For example, the elderly speaker replaced his spectacles, after the Mesopotamians moved from carving in stone to carving in clay, a process that rather altered the shape of certain glyphs, did they occasionally resurrect the shapes of the older glyphs in the way a writer in later centuries might deploy an archaism? I could hardly, I thought, say that my mother had died yesterday, since then people would wonder why I was here at all. Who is it sets off to a conference the very second his mother has died?

The talk on Mesopotamia was actually more interesting than I had expected, though it was crazy, I thought now, that my colleague’s PowerPoint slides showed only old photographs of the archaeologists and linguists who had found and deciphered the Mesopotamian glyphs decades before, many of them the speaker’s own teachers and colleagues. Why not show the glyphs themselves, and the difference between the old and the new? These photographs are ridiculous, I thought, twisting my neck to look at the screen behind the podium. They were all men, all old, all bearded. What were the students who had been co-opted for the occasion supposed to make of this? For of course to give the impression that the conference was well attended and had aroused lively interest, something the sponsors would want to be reassured of in a perfunctory kind of way, a number of students – most of them young, most of them women, as in all liberal-arts courses these days – had been diverted from their regular university classes and were sitting patiently at the back of the auditorium. What were these young women supposed to think, I wondered, of a set of PowerPoint slides showing black-and-white photographs of ageing male linguists with beards and pipes? Why not show the glyphs? These slides were themselves a kind of archaism, I suddenly realised, lending a romantic and chauvinist aura to a period of research and discovery long over. What could the young female students conclude, but that there was no place for them in the worlds of archaeology and linguistics; and what excuse should I give my hosts, who to tell the truth had welcomed me very warmly, for leaving the conference when it had barely begun? Elsa would call, I would respond at table, sitting beside my colleagues in the conference-hall refectory. Andreas Leitner, the chairman of the European Society, a nice, avuncular, rather sleazy fellow, had specifically asked me to have lunch with him. Elsa would hang up, as I had told her to. We had done this before. And I would continue to speak to the silent phone, as if in urgent conversation with someone requesting my immediate departure. Leitner would look at me, raising a bushy eyebrow. But for what reason? I didn’t want to invent an illness for one of the children, if only out of fear that such lies might bring bad luck. Did I really fear that? I don’t know. Bringing in the children just seemed beyond the pale.

Mr Mesopotamia, meanwhile, had sat down amid tepid applause and now a petite young woman, Elsa’s age maybe, or not much older, was talking about a corpus linguistics project which involved counting the archaisms in Don Quixote and in translations of Don Quixote in a dozen languages, including Russian and Mandarin Chinese. One day you sit beside your dying mother in a state of great emotional intensity, I thought, and the next you are obliged to listen to this kind of silliness.

Sitting behind the podium, while this young woman in a white blouse and green cardigan showed batteries of statistics on the mean distribution of archaisms in Czech and Japanese translations of Don Quixote, I began to feel seriously trapped. This happens to me all too often at conferences, as it happened to me as a child in church listening to my father’s sermons. One feels one has lost control of the present moment, that life is slipping away.

Automatically, I did what I always do in these circumstances: I pretended to take notes. As a child in church I pretended to pray, and as an adult at conferences I pretend to take notes. There you are.

‘Dear Elsa,’ I wrote. Each sheet of notepaper had the logo of the Society of European Linguists in the centre at the top. ‘I have been remembering when we first kissed at that seedy bar off Calle Mayor. What a strange evening it was! First the casual meeting on the stairs by the library, then the beer in the open market. My idea. Then my surprise when you suggested we move on to La Latina. Or rather, you said, If we’re going to have a drink, we should go somewhere nice next time. And I said, Why not go now? And you looked at your watch and thought a bit and then said, Okay. A couple of hours later, halfway down the steps into the metro, I proposed a whisky. Because you’d said earlier you’d never drunk whisky. You said okay. And right at the moment that you drained your first whisky, I kissed you. I had been meaning to kiss you for a long time of course, but I also thought of this meaning to kiss you as an aberration that any sensible man my age would soon get over. I did everything to suppress that urge to kiss, yet still found, despite myself, that I really did mean to kiss you. I had come to think of you, I suppose, over the two or three years we had known each other, as somehow, possibly, the right person, though any relationship between us seemed improbable and even incongruous. Yet I felt that. Impossible, incongruous, but right. Then that evening there was a growing warmth – no doubt the alcohol helped – and I kissed you. And you returned the kiss with a heat I couldn’t have expected. Madly, it seemed to me. Not your usual composed self, Elsa! Our lips touched and you were transformed. You sprang into life. And between kisses, as we decided to walk one metro stop across the park – remember? – you began to say that this should never have happened. This is a disaster, you said. We should never have allowed this to happen. You were distraught. We kissed passionately in the street, like teenagers, and between kisses you said, I am not the kind of person who does these things. I can’t do this. And I said, You are doing it, Elsa. Rather well, actually. You laughed. We sat on a bench in the park and you were on my knees, things got pretty wild, and then again you said you couldn’t do this, it wasn’t you, and what if people recognised us? And I said, I want to marry you, Elsa. I actually said that, didn’t I? Minutes after the first kiss. You laughed. I repeated, Elsa, I really believe you are the person I should marry; and you said I was mad, or very bad, or both, and the whole thing was a catastrophe and you had better be getting home. So we walked to the metro and now your boyfriend started calling you. From Barcelona. He called, you didn’t answer, but he kept calling. He called you every evening at bedtime, you said. It was a long-distance relationship of canonical phone calls, regular as clockwork. Liturgical even. He needed to know you had got home safely. You always said goodnight to each other. But only once you were safely home. You were upset, thinking you were not the kind of person who did this sort of thing. You could never hurt anyone, you said. But again we stopped in the park to kiss on another bench and, because it was getting cold now, you let me put my jacket round your shoulders and that was how your phone ended up in my jacket pocket. Then no sooner had you climbed into the metro just before midnight, having categorically refused to come home with me – you just didn’t do that kind of thing – than of course the phone started ringing again in my jacket pocket and, when I pulled it out, the screen showed it was your boyfriend. If I had known where you lived, this would have been the perfect excuse to come and see you and bring you the phone and perhaps start kissing again in more comfortable surroundings. But I didn’t know where you lived, and I couldn’t phone you now because you didn’t have your phone. I went home and wrote you an email. But you didn’t reply. You weren’t online. I couldn’t understand why not – it seemed the obvious thing, having lost your phone – and the phone kept ringing and I thought I couldn’t turn it off, because then your boyfriend would think you had turned it off so as not to speak to him, while if I left it on, he might just think you’d lost it or put it on silent. I tried to put it on silent myself, but it was not a phone I was familiar with and I couldn’t figure it out and didn’t want to tamper, so in the end I put the phone in an oven glove in a Tupperware box in the fridge, so as not to have to hear it ringing all night. I remember thinking there was a person who was very upset because of what we had done together, or who would be upset if he knew, but I couldn’t feel bad about what we had done; and towards six when I woke and checked the email, you had come online, you couldn’t sleep, and you said to meet you immediately, as soon as possible, because if you didn’t respond to his calls, he would tell your mother – probably he had already told your mother; his family was friends with your family, and if your mother couldn’t contact you, she would immediately call the police, because she too had to speak to you at least once a day and had to feel you were always on the other end of the phone ready to speak to her. I realised there was a whole life, your life, that I had stumbled into and upset. I thought you would never leave that life for me, and I went out and took the metro and found you at Atocha, looking exhausted and fraught, and I gave you the phone almost without a word, certainly without a kiss. You emailed to say you regretted it all, because nothing could ever come of it, and we must act as if nothing had happened, and I said I was immensely glad that what had happened had happened and that I had meant every word I said, but that I would do exactly as you wished. I promised never to mention it again and you wrote back a single word. Gracias.

Having overrun her time by almost ten minutes, the young lady colleague had now stepped down, and an older female professor in a maroon tailleur had gone to the lectern and was asking the question: When does grammatical correctness become archaism – for example, in the affirmations ‘It is I, ‘It is he’, and so on, as against the present received usage, ‘It’s me’, ‘It’s him’?

I sat up on hearing this, since the question was an interesting one: when is the old, the correct, the proper, perceived as out of date, as not really correct or proper any more, or too proper; why and what to do about it? The way to develop the argument, I immediately felt, was to show how, as soon as a usage acquires the status of a rule, a propriety, it is at risk of being perceived as old-fashioned, as resisting life, resisting change. Instead, the colleague went on to catalogue examples of correct usages now lapsing into disuse, and she too had a battery of statistics gleaned from a corpus of some ten million words of discursive texts.

I looked at the audience; a number of the students had left, others were whispering together, others still were busy with their phones, though some did seem to be taking serious notes. And I looked at my colleagues, most of whom had long learned to assume an air of professional interest at these occasions, whether out of a genuine sense of duty and respect to the speaker or the merest calculation of personal convenience, I couldn’t have said. Perhaps some of them really were interested.

I took it all in at a glance, saw the clock at the back of the room inching towards midday, then went back to my notepad and wondered why on earth I was writing like this to Elsa, on paper, by hand, when no one mails paper to anyone these days. Let alone handwritten. Handwritten letters on paper are as archaic as the assertion ‘It is I’. Everything I had written here to Elsa was true and it was rather wonderful to remember it, but it was also true that after Elsa changed her mind and fired her boyfriend and came to live with me, I found there was a part of myself that had always thought she had been right, that this shouldn’t have happened between us. I was too old. The future was impossible. People would be highly critical. My children would be shocked. Elsa herself would regret it. I was forcing my ageing body on her, I thought. My decay. My corruption. Things might be fine today, but what about in ten years? We should never have done this.

The happier I was with Elsa – and I was very happy, quietly, calmly happy in a way that was entirely new to me – the more frequently these negative thoughts presented themselves. Now the sudden return of the old peeing problem confirmed all misgivings. Elsa, this is hard, but you must leave me. That is what I ought to be writing to her. I ought to be explaining to this young woman that I didn’t have the energy, the vitality, to carry through this relationship. Yet on scribbling down a letter absolutely off the top of my head, while my colleague rather tediously considered the relationship between archaism and syntactical correctness – and it seemed astonishing to me that she didn’t field the case of ‘whom’ (perhaps I could mention it myself, I thought, in the discussion afterwards; perhaps I could offer the classic example ‘for whom the bell tolls’, where archaism and memento mori are superimposed, as if archaisms were mementi mori, of a kind) – on scribbling down a few thoughts, to take my mind off the vast waste of life that every conference is (why had it seemed so important for me to come?), instead of telling Elsa we should split up, I had been writing a love letter, remembering the excitement, the wonder, the huge rush of positive emotion that evening when we first kissed and the barriers fell away between us. We moved from being strangers who happened to meet from time to time to man and woman arm-in-arm. Lovers. I felt Elsa and I were lovers the moment we kissed. At once I said, I could marry you, Elsa, no, I want to marry you, and you said we should never have done this, then kissed me all the more passionately, as if something tremendously urgent were at stake, something that just had to be done. That a love should be.

I sat now, at the conference, needing to go to the bathroom, with my pen poised, wondering how I might continue this letter to Elsa, all the time trying to look as if I were taking notes about my colleague’s talk on grammatical correctness and archaism. Had something really changed between Elsa and myself over the last forty-eight hours? With my mother’s death? Unable to answer that question or go on with the letter, I suddenly had the very strong sensation that I was two people. That was the only way to describe my state of mind. I was two people: one going one way, one another; one in love with Elsa, determined to make this young Spanish woman my destiny, and one still attached to family and children, wife and mother, and my position in that world of family and mother and wife. Which was also the world of my work, of course, in the sense that the colleagues in my field knew about my family, and my family knew about my work, but neither the one nor the other knew about Elsa. And each separate ‘I’ was attached to a place: the Elsa ‘I’ to Madrid, where I was now Emeritus Professor, and the other family ‘I’ to almost everywhere else – all the many cities we had lived in through the years – and of course, to Edinburgh, to London, to Mother. Mother was a place, I suddenly thought, as much as a person. Mother was a planet. A clay planet. She had gravity. But it was not a gravity that included Elsa. Elsa was a comet. A shooting star. It had been a mockery, I thought, to have pronounced Elsa’s name in Mother’s presence, when Mother was not only unconscious but never likely to become conscious again. It was like a comet passing unseen on a night of thick cloud cover.

The present speaker had now fallen into the error of disparaging and regretting the new usages that had replaced the old, showing an obvious preference for more syntactically elaborate periods and an emotional, and perhaps class, attachment to the supposedly ‘correct’. Correct syntax, she said, tended to attract a greater lexical richness. This was a state of affairs she evidently felt was positive, even morally positive. Which amounted, I felt, to a complete misunderstanding of the dynamic that fuses syntax and vocabulary in language. Nothing could be less rich than a dusty embalming of elaborate syntax in the Anglican hymnal. But how could two selves become one, I wondered, still unable to continue this letter, which most likely I would tear up as soon as the conference session was over.

How do two selves become one? I wrote on the same piece of paper, immediately under the word Gracias. You were two selves, Elsa, when you kissed me passionately, then said it was a disaster. But after that month of silence, when I supposed the romance was over, you showed me how two can become one. Simple. One self kills the other. You fired your boyfriend, came to my apartment and we made love. He was upset. You were upset. It was a death. But you did it of your own free will. I never asked you to. And from the moment you had done it, you never looked back. So why am I looking back, I wondered? Why do I find it so difficult to go forward? Was it perhaps – I remembered another of Mother’s favourite expressions – that I had feet of clay? I wanted to go forward but my feet were stuck in the ground, clay in clay. Or perhaps the ballast in my older life was simply too great; it generated a crippling gravity. It was the ballast made David decide to marry the woman he had already lived with for thirty years, always saying that she was not his woman. Those thirty years with Deborah were David, even if not the whole David. So he killed the other David and married Deborah. But not with the same joy that Elsa killed her other self and turned to me. Elsa, I wrote, you fill my life with joy …

My effusion was interrupted by applause. The syntactically correct lady in the maroon tailleur sat down with an archaic smile. The chair asked the audience for questions. There was a fidgety silence. People were getting hungry. Following a routine etiquette in these cases, the chair framed a question himself to be put to all of us. Most of the words we use, he said, are more or less old. Would any of us care to comment on why some remain current for hundreds of years while others become archaisms, and others again simply fall into disuse and do not have a second life of any kind, not even in Scrabble?

He smiled and said, ‘Professor Sanders?’, throwing the ball to his inaugural speaker, as good manners demanded.

‘I can’t answer that question,’ I told him. My head was elsewhere. ‘There are a thousand reasons why one thing supplants another. Arguably, behind it all there is a dynamic that requires there be a constant process of death and renewal. Perhaps more interesting would be to wonder about the tensions that occur in people’s behaviour when those linguistic changes take place: why some people resist change and others lap it up; why someone is happy to say “bathroom” while another will stand firm by “toilet” till his dying day; why one person enthusiastically embraces the use of “impact” as a verb while another refuses and will never, ever form a sentence in which one thing impacts on another.’

As I said this, the chairman smiled and raised a hand and said, ‘That’s me!’ and the audience laughed.

‘Perhaps the whole process of linguistic change,’ I wound up, ‘has the hidden function of allowing people to make clear their attitude to change in general.’

We were still discussing this forty minutes later over lunch, when Elsa phoned me in response to my text message. I excused myself for answering the phone in their presence, assumed an alarmed expression, pushed my seat back and went between the tables towards the door of the canteen, as if seeking a quiet place to talk. In fact Elsa had already rung off. Back at the table, I said I would have to leave at once. My mother had just been taken to hospital. She had been seriously ill for some time, I explained. Quite likely this was the end.

Andreas Leitner, bearded and affable, chewing pork, was upset. ‘Of course, you must go at once.’ He swallowed. ‘Let me get someone to check when your next flight is, while you finish your meal.’ But I said I preferred to go absolutely at once, rather than losing any precious time. I didn’t want to arrive and find my mother had already passed away. I would go and get my things from the hotel and take a taxi straight to Tegel, to be on the first flight available. Otherwise I might hate myself later.

‘But this is such a shame, Tom.’ He wiped his mouth and stood up, took my hand. ‘It’s been so good seeing you again. You’re always so full of ideas.’

Walking back to the hotel, I felt that he was right and it really was rather a shame; it had been a genuine pleasure talking to Leitner, who was one of those cautious, politically astute academics who nevertheless appreciate the more maverick and kamikaze members of the fraternity when they come across them. The meat had been surprisingly good too, and I had left most of it on my plate. Fairly sure no one from the conference would be following, I stopped at a café and ordered a goulash and a glass of wine. Waiting for the food, I phoned Elsa.

‘Hardly,’ I said. ‘Mum isn’t the kind of person whose death gets into the papers.’

I realised then that it had made me feel close to Mother again, using her as an excuse for one last time. And not just as an excuse, of course, since I really was going to see her. It was urgent.

‘I don’t know.’ My wine arrived. ‘Actually, I imagine not, since they’ll need the beds, I’m sure. I doubt they have a proper morgue there. She’ll have been taken to the undertaker’s.’

‘I just feel I left things unfinished, in the hurry to get to the conference. You know? It was stupid. I should have cancelled. In the end, I hate conferences. I can’t understand why I bothered.’

‘We didn’t really have a conversation, though. I arrived just too late. It seems she’d been having ordinary conversations right up to a couple of hours before. Even on the phone.’

‘I’m sure that was the important thing, Tom. For her to know you were there. That was a big comfort. When will the funeral be?’

I said I had no idea. Probably in a few days. My brother-in-law was arranging it.

‘You could get someone else to do the lessons, and stay in London till it’s over. You could work from there.’

She chuckled. Her mother had reacted rather better than expected to the news of this baby, though she didn’t seem to want to hear about the father at all. ‘As if the business of there being a man involved was completely irrelevant.’

Elsa’s mother had divorced three times. We talked about her family, until the goulash arrived and I rang off and ordered a second glass of wine. Eating with appetite, I felt immensely encouraged by the conversation with Elsa, almost back to where I’d been before the conference at Amersfoort, a happy man who’d had the good luck to meet the perfect woman rather late in life. I downed the second glass of wine, and now it occurred to me that perhaps the best thing would have been to stay at the conference, which wasn’t so dire as I had feared, and return to Madrid on my scheduled flight. I could have spent the night with Elsa, which always meant sleeping well, and the following lunchtime there was my weekly appointment with the shrink, who no doubt would have had much to say about my volatile state of mind these last forty-eight hours. Instead I had made this dramatic gesture of returning to my mother’s deathbed when she was already dead.

The sun was bright in the broad Berlin streets. I enjoyed the walk back to Görlitzerstrasse. The wine had given me a buzz. The air felt chill and sharp. Perhaps it was going to snow. Life is good, I thought. On arrival at the hotel I went straight up to my room, without stopping in reception, and lay on the bed. The room was freshly clean and, with the sunshine through lace curtains, it looked nicer than I had thought yesterday evening. I had been tense and too busy with my PowerPoint. Now I noticed a comfortable armchair in blue leather and a competent painting of a frozen lake under leaden skies, with ducks flying low over the ice. Closing my eyes, I fell at once into a deep sleep and dreamed the phone was ringing. I mean, I dreamed a ringing phone had woken me up. But it was not a phone I knew. First, I had to find where it was in the room and then I had some trouble actually answering it. I didn’t know which button to press. In the end I missed the call and was just falling asleep again, in my dream of course, when it rang a second time. This time I picked it up at once, and at once the line was open. I didn’t need to press anything. Hello, I said. Tom Sanders here. There was an electronic silence of beeps and scratches, which I found threatening. I felt I had been caught out and was about to be accused of something terribly compromising. Then, very loudly, my mother said, ‘Hello, Thomas dear, it’s Mum!’ It was her brightest, most cheerful, let’s-all-be-jolly-together voice, and I woke with a start.

It was five o’clock. I had slept two-and-a-half hours. Presumably the hotel hadn’t been warned I was cutting my stay short, otherwise someone would have come up to check the room. I felt groggy and surprised by the intensity of the dream. ‘Hello, Thomas!’ It was exactly Mum’s voice. She had called me. There would be a crumble in the oven, farmhouse cream in the fridge. I took a shower, then wearing the white bathrobe they always give you in these places, I opened my computer and sat down to check my email and book a flight. It was already twenty-four hours since Mother died, I thought, waiting for the machine to boot up. I wondered what would have happened to her body in that period. How did it while away the time? I could have phoned my sister and asked her, but I didn’t. For some reason I didn’t want to speak to my sister. Checking my email, I found that with what had arrived today and what I hadn’t managed to look at yesterday, there were now twenty-nine messages demanding my attention.

I wrote to Elsa at once, telling her how wonderful it had been to speak to her on the phone and how every time I heard her voice I felt more deeply in love with her. The problem, if I left for the airport now, I thought, would be that very likely I would run into one or another of the conference speakers in reception, since we were all staying in this same hotel. Then they would see I hadn’t departed in haste to my mother’s deathbed, as I’d said I would. Probably the best thing, then, would be to check out very early the following morning – say, six-thirtyish – when there was no danger of running into anyone. My brother had written saying he had heard from my sister that Mother had died peacefully in the afternoon. No doubt, he said, she felt she had struggled enough. He was glad, he wrote, that he had managed to speak to her while she was still compos mentis, only the evening before. On the phone. I replied asking him when he planned to arrive for the funeral? If he was already on his way, would he like to go and see the body with me?

I then opened Dr Sharp’s message. He had been concerned, he said, about the state of mind he had left me in at Schiphol. Had I made my plane? How was my mother? It had been generous of me, he said, in the circumstances, to go ahead with the talk to the physiotherapists. If I used the wand, he warned, I should be careful. ‘Read the attachments I’m sending with this email, which will explain the correct amount of pressure to apply,’ he finished, ‘and feel free to call me any time.’ There was a number in California. But now I saw a new message had arrived; it was a reply from my brother already. He had no plans to come to the funeral, he said. He couldn’t really see the point of making long transcontinental trips for funerals. But even if he did come, he said, he certainly wouldn’t be going to see Mum’s body, thank you very much. The coffin would be quite enough.

I felt rather shocked by this – brought up in my tracks, as Mother would have said. Perhaps language constantly renews itself, I thought then, so that we can identify a whole series of sayings that were special to our parents’ generation, then feel nostalgic using them ourselves from time to time. Whoopsy-daisy. Feet of clay. Almost like seeing old photographs. And I wondered if someone would take a photograph of the body. Of Mother dead. Should I do that perhaps, when I went to visit her? What struck me was not just my brother’s not wishing to see the body, but his absolute certainty that he didn’t want to see it. I really should leave for Tegel as early as possible tomorrow morning, I decided. I should look for a flight now.

‘I’m surprised you don’t want to come to the funeral,’ I wrote to my brother. ‘I mean, I know it’s a long haul, but it’s Mum’s funeral, for heaven’s sake. I think you should come.’

I didn’t usually write in these urgent tones to my brother. He was an older brother. I wasn’t in the habit of telling him what I thought he should do. He would reply at once, I thought, and I got up to make myself a coffee to clear my head. There was a tartan mini-pack of Scottish shortbreads. How strange to be reminded of Scotland, and hence of my Scottish wife. How was I going to have dinner, I wondered, if I didn’t want to risk going out through reception? And if I ordered food in my room and it came out that I had done that, what would they think of me? But why did I care what they thought of me?

My brother hadn’t replied. I logged into my bank account and paid the insurance premium that was pending, then opened the message from the old girlfriend that had so intrigued me yesterday, but had somehow lost all interest today. ‘Was in Camden Market, this afternoon,’ she wrote, ‘and had to pop into the pub for a pee. Suddenly remembered we had had lunch there once. The Lock Tavern. It was a lovely memory.’

How nice. How nice it was to get friendly messages from old lovers. Should I reply? This was very likely the girl I had been with when Charlie read my email correspondence with David. Maybe. Hard to remember the chronology of those who were never part of your official life. Like dreams. David and I always exchanged jokey, sexually explicit remarks in our emails. No doubt it had been disturbing for Charlie to read them, to think of his father, who lived and slept with his mother, talking so flippantly about the way this or that woman did or did not do oral sex. Why had we insisted on that infantile correspondence, I wondered now, over three or four long years? I could go back in my email account, presumably, and find those emails, if I wanted to. I had no desire to. Why would I do that? We were trying, I suppose, to find some way of making light of those impulses that were pushing us to abandon our partners. We were trying to pretend that the absolute necessity of some new relationship was merely a sexual drive, merely a fleshly impulse. We weren’t suppressing the flesh, but we were pretending it was only flesh, not important, while continuing with the old relationship, which was the spiritual thing, the inward thing, hence the superior thing. Plus, of course, the old relationship was above all the practical thing, the thing that made social and economic sense, the thing that didn’t hurt anyone but ourselves. That was why our emails had to be so sexual, so scornful of love, so pornographic. So infantile. I had explained all this some time ago to the shrink. Or rather, while I had talked about the past, the shrink had encouraged me to see it all in this light: a wilful denial of the need for love. ‘What is all this about?’ my wife demanded when the twins told her about the text messages. Pornography is a denial of the need for love. That seems obvious now. ‘Nothing,’ I told her. ‘A stupid erotic game. Nothing else.’ So I betrayed my girlfriend of the time, not unlike St Peter, perhaps, when they put him under pressure and he denied Our Lord three times. What an analogy! But of course this was exactly what my wife wanted to hear. It was nothing. It was an erotic game. Her husband had feet of clay. And what Deborah had wanted to believe, no doubt, if anyone had ever told her anything about David. Her man was caving in to some meaningless cravings of the flesh. Carnal affections. Pornography is not the enemy of respectability, I thought. Rather its secret ally. ‘You had your Mexican poncho,’ I wrote to this girlfriend of some years ago. ‘And England won the Ashes while we drained our beers.’ A world of respectable ordered lives could hardly exist without pornography, without affairs.

But what did any of this have to do with Mother, or the business in hand, my getting back to London to see her body? Nobody was more respectable than Mother, I thought, no one more willing to hear a respectable lie rather than a painful truth. I opened the two emails from the twins, sent almost simultaneously. No doubt their mother had told them to write to me and they had. ‘Dad, how’s Granny? We have a big race tomorrow. We’ve been training for it for months. Give us some news. Tell us if we should come right afterwards.’ ‘Dad, sorry we can’t come right now because of this race, but tell Granny we love her and we’ll come soon.’ ‘Kids,’ I wrote to both in one email, ‘I’m afraid your gran passed away yesterday afternoon. You shouldn’t worry about not coming, because I don’t think you could have made it in time, and anyway she wasn’t conscious at the end. Your brother and sister were there. She died very peacefully. Let me know if you will be able to come to the funeral. It would be good if we were all together.’

Of course this news, I thought, would now go straight to my wife. When I communicated with the twins, it often felt as if in fact I were communicating with my wife, but at a remove. I wondered sometimes if both of us didn’t find some consolation in this communication, as if it testified to an old affection between us. But I also wondered whether it was right to put this burden on the twins. And, in this particular instance, whether it was right to exclude my wife from an event like this, my mother’s death, when she had been part of the family for so long. So without having planned to write to my wife at all – on the contrary, I had supposed I would already be in England and heading for the undertaker’s, or a morgue somewhere – I now found myself writing quite a long email to my wife, possibly the longest email I had written to her since the day we signed the separation papers. ‘It was great the children came,’ I wrote. ‘They both behaved wonderfully, I felt proud of them. Mother died peacefully surrounded by the people she loved. Not a bad way to go.’

Rereading this, I was struck by the fact that I had again used the word my brother said my sister had used, when describing the death: ‘peacefully’. Peaceful is the word that collocates with dying when you want to express reassurance. Or to reassure yourself, perhaps. But reassure yourself of what? That dying is not so bad? That the dead person didn’t suffer too much? What is too much? Did Mother really feel peaceful? Certainly she hadn’t the night before. ‘If only,’ she had shouted. When faith seems weak and victory lost. ‘Take me tonight, Lord.’ Mother was only peaceful the following day because the battle was already over. ‘She is on her way, Mr Sanders.’ She was already gone, was what they meant. She had lost so much blood, and was so full of drugs, that the wildest, most tormented, cocaine-snorting fanatic would have been peaceful. Mother had been a fanatic of course, in her respectable way. She was certainly tormented. So should I change what I had written to my wife, I wondered? Should I tell my wife that my mother had died doubting her Christianity? This would lead me back to the long complicity between myself and my wife against my family’s faith. My wife and I had always felt superior to my mother, my father, my sister and my brother-in-law because they were born-again Christians, ingenuous and evangelical. Barbarians really. Should I tell my wife about my mother’s need at the end for props, in the form of Kenneth E. Hagin’s book about why God doesn’t always answer your prayers? My wife would feel gratified by this reminder of our old complicity. A couple is a couple in part because of the enemies they share. Certainly this was the case with my mother and father, who were a couple against the World, the Flesh and the Devil. In token that thou too shalt strive. My wife would feel gratified and say, If you’re over for the funeral, Tom, why not come up to Edinburgh for a day? Yes, writing that my mother’s death had not been a peaceful one would almost certainly lead to an invitation to go up to Edinburgh to see my wife. Would that be such a bad thing? Travelling back with the twins, perhaps, after the funeral, on the fast train from King’s Cross, always assuming they actually came to the funeral. I looked at the word ‘peaceful’ on the screen – she died peacefully – and thought how unflaggingly and shamelessly we yearn for the reassuring narrative. The narrative that allows us to bury the whole damn thing and get on with life. It can only make sense. And in the end, after the tormented night, there had been an extraordinary atmosphere of peace around Mother’s deathbed those last two hours when she was breathing her last.

Sitting at the window in the Görlitzerstrasse, looking out at bare branches, parked cars, tidy Teutonic façades, I went back in my mind to the feeling in the room when Mother was dying, to the bodies of my son and daughter, their partners, my sister and brother-in-law, their daughter, my uncle, his son, my cousin, all leaning slightly forward on their seats, listening for something that would soon be something no more, listening for an absence that would confirm a departure we all knew had already occurred. Was that peaceful? Certainly it was calm, and resigned. There was a feeling of truce. There were battles set aside. There was a baseline affection for each other. Something had been allowed to emerge that is always there, but that we don’t often express: our tenderness towards others, and towards ourselves, because mortal.

That was it. What we had all shared, during those last two quiet hours as my mother slipped away, was the intense awareness of being mortal, fleshly, animals. That was where the tenderness came from. Being dying animals together. With feet of clay. It was important that no one had said anything. The silence had made the awareness possible. Our silent awareness of the breath that was going. Our shared attention to dying. Then the absence. The last breath gone and our not knowing it was the last breath. A rising intensity of animal awareness and expectation. Smelling death, perhaps. My son and my daughter who came into this world from my semen leaning forward on their seats, breathless, listening for another breath from my mother who brought me into this world from her belly, between her thighs, then the nurse coming in and lifting the wrist and the swollen arm, making her announcement, and immediately an explosion of action. Immediately haste and movement and fretfulness. The last hours had been peaceful, but apparently it was a peacefulness that yearned to end and explode in action, in denial of dying. Life is always a denial of dying perhaps. I had stood up and hurried to the bathroom and recovered my suitcase from the guest room and, without even realising what I was doing, abandoned Mum’s poor body right at the climactic moment when the soul flies to heaven to meet its Maker. Animals stay by their loved one’s bodies, I thought. Even if only to lick their fur for a while. You fled to Berlin to give the Inaugural Address at the 27th Annual Conference of European Linguists. Knowing that these conferences are all much of a muchness. As Mum would have said.

I sent the email to my wife unchanged and immediately started to hunt for flights back to the UK. There was one at 8.40 a.m. I could make it, I thought, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to buy the ticket.

Confused, I went to the bathroom to pee. Why wasn’t I buying the ticket, when I felt so intensely I should go back and see Mother again? ‘Hello, Thomas,’ she had called in my dream. She had phoned! ‘It’s Mum,’ she said. The voice was cheerful. She was cheerful because she thought I was going back to see her. So why didn’t I book the ticket? This confusion was alarming. I should call the shrink, I thought. From our very first meeting, the shrink had made a point of telling me I could always call her in a crisis. ‘Don’t hesitate to phone me, Señor Sanders,’ the shrink said. And whenever she saw I was going through a bad patch she reminded me, ‘Don’t hesitate to phone me, if it all gets too much, Señor Sanders.’

Yet I never had called the shrink. I did not want to appear weak. It seemed like an enormous collapse on my part to have gone to a shrink in the first place. To have sat down in a shrink’s office and wept and formulated the bizarre phrase ‘Que haya un amor’. How strange to unburden oneself in a foreign language. Surely that was humiliation enough. I didn’t want to become the kind of guy who has to phone his shrink at the drop of a hat, as my mother would have said. The kind of guy who needs to have his hand held. I don’t want to give the shrink that satisfaction, I thought, that power over me. Though why I should think of my relationship with the shrink in these terms, I don’t know. For example, if I phoned the shrink now, she would advise me against going back to London to see my mother’s body. She would see it as another manifestation of an indoctrinated guilt, as she did when I kept going back to see my wife after having left home, making long and tiring flights from Madrid to Edinburgh for weekends that could not have been more depressing. ‘Why do you keep doing things that you have no desire to do, Señor Sanders?’ she would say. Although actually I did desire to go back and see Mother and spend a few minutes with her body. It wasn’t remotely comparable to going back to see my wife. Nothing could be said to be starting again from going to see my mother. Could it? She was dead. How could anything start again? Why haven’t you bought the ticket then, the shrink would ask? Why have you phoned me? You have phoned me because you know I will advise you not to go. That was true. And since I knew that would be her advice, there was clearly no point in phoning her.

I moved the computer to the bedside table where the phone was – it was extraordinary my brother hadn’t responded to my message, since I know he checks his email every waking hour – opened the email from Dr Sharp again and dialled his number in California. What time was it now in California? I had no idea. Early in the morning.

‘Mark Sharp.’ It was his voice. I have it on my computer in fifty-five relaxation sessions.

Lifting my eyes, I saw the frozen lake in paint and the three ducks flying low across it, looking for some water to land on perhaps? It really was a rather fine painting, for a hotel room.

‘Tom! I’ve been thinking about you! How’s it going? How is your mother?’

I told the doctor that my mother had died, but that I had at least got to see her, and when he started to offer his condolences, I said thanks, but that was not what I was calling him for. ‘The fact is I’m just about to use your wand for the first time; I was wondering if you had any advice to offer.’

‘Ah. Okay.’ The doctor seemed surprised. ‘Have you read the articles I sent? About trigger points and calibrating the pressure you apply?’

‘And you have the videos with Tom Ingram’s instructions, right? On the pen-drive.’

‘Well, there’s really not much I would want to add to that,’ Dr Sharp said.

I had the impression he was drinking something as he spoke. Perhaps it was breakfast time.

There was a silence on the line, which was a little odd, considering what a loquacious man Dr Sharp was. Calling California from a four-star German hotel was not going to be cheap.

‘I just thought there might be some crucial piece of personal advice you could offer,’ I told him, my eyes fixed on the three ducks in search of a spot to land. At least they had company.

‘Tom,’ Dr Sharp sighed. ‘The thing is not to imagine it will solve things from one moment to the next. Maybe we made a mistake when we decided to call it a wand. You know? It’s not magic. Use it slowly and very gently, otherwise you’ll make things worse. You’ve got a lot of tension stored up in there. Be kind to yourself. Don’t try to hit a home run.’

The nice thing about the painting was the way it caught the last rays of sun over the wintry scene, with the ducks flying through a pinkish dusk, looking for somewhere to spend the night. An odd mix of beauty and anxiety.

I said thanks, I would be in touch to let him know how I got on with the wand, and hung up.

I pulled the wand from its plastic bag, which also included a pack of ten thin rubber gloves. The idea was to stretch the middle finger of the glove over the ball at the top of the wand, pull it down the shaft, then tie it off beyond the plastic ring that prevented the thing from disappearing up your butt. All of which I did. What was missing was some lubricant. I went into the bathroom, where there were the usual pots of hand cream. Would that work? I feared it wouldn’t, but opened a pot anyway and smeared the runny white cream on the rubber. Apparently I had decided to go ahead with this wand experiment, come what may. Yet another of Mother’s expressions. Come hell or high water. I hadn’t realised how many I used. I plumped up two pillows so that I could half sit, half lie on the bed, then decided perhaps I really should read the article Dr Sharp had sent me and at least open the video on the pen-drive and check out the first lesson. I got up again to fetch the computer, which was on the desk. Outside, snowflakes had begun to fall into the tidy German street.

The article was more complex than I had imagined. There was a long preamble about myofascial muscle tissue, the formation of trigger points, their referral of pain to remote points of the body, such that a trigger point embedded in the muscle of the abdomen could be responsible for a pain in the perineum or testicles. Why was that? Why did life have to be so complicated? Then a long section on the proper technique for releasing the tension that these trigger points supposedly stored and blocked. Was it all nonsense? Could it be that Dr Sharp was a quack? I felt impatient. Toggling to my email, I noticed new messages from my wife and Deborah, among others. I didn’t want to open them and so went back to Dr Sharp’s article. The key was to use the wand only to meet the pain, but no more than that. At least initially. Just go to greet the pain, Dr Sharp’s article said, then stop. Or rather, then hold it there for two minutes. What exactly did he mean by that? Were meeting the pain and greeting the pain the same thing? Can you greet something for two minutes? There was the slight problem that since I had already smeared the rubber glove covering the tip of the wand with hand cream, I was having to hold it in the air with my left hand to prevent it from smearing the sheets. Fed up with this, I now got off the bed and managed to hook the snorkel part of the wand over the bedside lamp in such a way that the creamy bit wasn’t touching anything. I then removed my jeans and underwear, ready for the adventure.

‘Thanks for yours, Tom. It’s good to think of the kids being there. It’s an important experience for them, and I’m glad it was so peaceful. I would have come myself, but feared I would not be welcome. I have written messages of condolence to your brother and sister. I hope that’s okay with you. Let me know if you want me to come to the funeral, though I don’t suppose you will. You seem so determined to throw everything away. Anyhow, the twins want to come. They adored Gran. Just let me know when it is and I’ll put them on the train. Your loving ex.’

I scanned this through a first time, very rapidly, skipping here and there, as I always do with my wife’s emails, in much the same way, I suppose, that you open a package you fear might be hiding some kind of booby trap. Then, having checked it was safe, as it were, I read it again carefully, at which point I realised that actually it wasn’t safe at all. Precisely its reasonableness, its air of placid, nostalgic hurt, made this brief email extremely dangerous.

Deciding not to respond, or not at once, I turned to the window, where snow was falling thickly and steadily through yellow lamplight. It looked rather beautiful and very calm and I watched it for a couple of minutes, as if granted a truce. It was the slow steadiness of the falling flakes that did it, the feeling that they were simply doing what any snowflake has to do, falling: without enthusiasm, without protest. The ice on the lake where the ducks were flying also communicated a sense of calm and truce. Something had been stopped, arrested, though it was hard to see where the ducks would be able to stop, if they didn’t want to land on the ice. Were the ducks calm? I felt they were. They were calm despite their predicament, flying over this broad expanse of ice. Then, turning back to the window and the snow, I was reminded of the calm in my mother’s room in the hours before she died. Mother was falling into death, the way every mortal animal must at some point fall, and every fleeting snowflake. It was a movement beyond conflict, beyond the aberration of metaphysical battles won and lost, of faith weak or strong. All of a sudden you let go and bowed to the old imperatives of gravity and death. It was so easy. Everything is easy, I thought, in the end. It’s before the end that’s hard.

Meantime, on my computer screen Tom Ingram was sitting on a blue sofa holding the yellow wand between the fingers of two raised hands. I clicked Play and he began to talk. Even on the video he conveyed the sense of a man entirely at ease. Not a professional broadcaster or a publicity man, simply a good honest fellow at ease with himself and his technical competence and perfectly happy to appear on a video about anal massage. ‘Today we’re going to start you off on the wand,’ he said and was obviously talking not just to camera but to an audience, presumably at Dr Sharp’s San Diego clinic. At once I wished I was there, at the clinic with the other sufferers, listening to this wonderful man. ‘Nothing spectacular,’ he said, ‘nothing life-changing. We’re just going to get used to inserting the wand in the anus and taking it out again, without doing ourselves any harm.’ He leaned back on the sofa, lifted his knees and showed how to position the wand against the dark perineal seam of his jeans. All this with a quiet laconic dignity that hypnotised me, as I was also hypnotised, looking up again, by the falling snow. It seemed I wanted to be hypnotised.

It was now 7 p.m. Should I order dinner or try the wand first? I could hardly have the thing hanging over the lampshade when they brought up a tray of schnitzel. Undecided, it occurred to me I should check the weather forecast. Heavy snow. That was worrying. I found the Tegel website. What if they were cancelling flights? Nothing. Tegel’s website said nothing about the weather. Was that encouraging? I should definitely buy my ticket now. ‘What happens to a body,’ I typed into Google, ‘after death and before burial?’ This to find out where Mother was up to, so to speak. But glancing through the sites that popped up – Our dear Auntie Lilah exhumed after fifteen years, YouTube, 4.27 minutes – I decided to investigate no further. All I wanted to do was to see Mother for a few moments, half an hour maybe, touch her forehead perhaps, say goodbye, maybe apologise for having rushed off to a stupid conference when she was going to meet her Maker. Though why my mother should be interested in an apology from me, if she was waltzing her way through Gloryland, was hard to say; and if she wasn’t, she would be none the wiser. I toggled back to the email and opened Deborah’s. ‘Tom,’ she had written, ‘something terrible has happened. Dave took some pills. He’s in coma. If you can, please come.’

I took the wand from the bedside lamp, peeled off the creamy rubber glove and chucked it in the bin, dressed, packed my bag, wand included, then hurried down to reception, where I checked out and paid my extras in full view of various speakers from the 27th Annual Conference of the Society of European Linguists, who were sipping what looked to me like Weissbier in the busy hotel bar.

XV