In Extremis

I realise now that I couldn’t, as I first thought, have received that email from my sister, the one that listed her expenses on Mother’s behalf and introduced the unexpected embalming, while at the hotel on the Görlitzerstrasse. It must have been in the Ibis at Tegel. And not the evening I checked in there, after finding there were no places on the last flight to Heathrow. A courtesy bus had driven us through a sprawl of airport wasteland to this miserably prefabricated dormitory. Convinced it would be another sleepless night, I hadn’t seen the point in spending more. Not the evening, then, when I arrived at the Ibis, at once a mythical bird and a miserable hotel chain, nor the following morning, when ten inches of snow had caused the suspension of all flights in and out of the airport, so that having gone down early for breakfast, I realised there was no point in checking out in a hurry. No, I must have got my sister’s email towards midday, shortly before being forced to vacate the room if I wasn’t planning to stay another night. Hence one of the reasons I responded to my sister so rapidly would have been the need to shut down my laptop and check out of the hotel.

I had booked myself onto a Lufthansa flight due to leave at 11 a.m., but it was repeatedly rescheduled as the morning passed and the snow disruptions got worse. My old friend David was in a coma. Outside, the world was absolutely white. On checking into the Ibis the evening before, I had phoned Deborah, who told me David had come home from the hospital in the morning and taken the pills that afternoon in his room, where he had gone for a nap. She had called him to come down for his tea towards five and gone to peep at his door when he didn’t reply. From this I deduced that they now slept in separate rooms. He was lying on his back, fully dressed with his hands folded on his stomach. And I mustn’t imagine it was a suicide attempt, she protested, because they had just had a really lovely lunch together and downed a bottle of Sauvignon. He hadn’t left a letter or anything. It was just that his frustration with insomnia had led him to overdo it.

Charlie had gone off to stay with Stephen at his parents’ place in Cornwall, she said.

‘He would think it was his fault,’ Deborah’s voice became shrill. ‘He’d be terribly upset.’ If David came out of the coma, she thought, before next weekend, there’d be no need to tell the boy at all.

When I asked what the doctors were saying, she said they weren’t being very communicative. He was in the West Middlesex again, she said. Intensive care.

On putting the phone down, I looked through my pockets and wallet and the various compartments of my old Samsonite bag and finally found the Post-it Charlie had given me, stuck to the back of my Barclays Connect. It was disquieting that I couldn’t remember having put it in such a very particular place. David’s veto had surely lapsed now, I felt. If anything, I owed it to my old friend to try to find out what was going on. I called the number three times, but only got the answering service. ‘My name is Tom Sanders,’ I said. ‘I’m a friend of David Pool’s. I wanted to talk to you about him.’

Snowed in at the Ibis, I had spent a night much like the two previous nights, and finally flew out of Tegel towards evening the next day, knowing now that if I wanted to see Mother I would have to see her embalmed, and that if I wanted to see David I would have to see him in coma. Things had moved fast while I was at the 27th Annual Conference of the European Society of Linguists.

Landing at Heathrow, I had only to take the Piccadilly Line a few stops to East Hounslow, then walk for fifteen minutes to arrive at my mother’s house at the bottom of a small suburban cul-de-sac. It was snowing again, but without the conviction and solemnity of the German snow. These were ice flakes in a gusty wind. Mother kept her spare key, as I recalled, in a plastic pill-container pushed down the side of the big earthenware bowl in the middle of her front patio. In the summer this was a place for geraniums, but right now it was coated in a thin rime of snow. I put my bag down by the door, crouched beside the bowl and got my hands dirty, thrusting cold fingers into the earth at various points around the rim. I knew that the neighbour to the left, Christine, would also have a spare key. Her light was shining between the cracks in heavy curtains. She was the person my mother had turned to after her fall, when the pain got too much and she realised she wouldn’t be able to go on in the house. But for some reason I didn’t want anyone to know I was here. Ferreting in the earth for the key, I couldn’t help thinking of exhuming bodies. There was no analogy really, but seeing the dirt under my fingernails on this icy Hounslow evening, I thought of it anyway. Our dear Auntie Lilah …

A white plastic tube surfaced: Haliborange Vitamin C chewable tablets, the same more or less that Mother had given us as children, though in those days you sucked rather than chewed. The key was a little rusty, but it turned the lock. Inside, everything was as she had left it, except for a small pile of post that had accumulated on the doormat, in particular five editions of the Church of England Weekly. I went to the kitchen to wash my hands and found dirty dishes in the sink and a fridge full of sour milk and decomposing greens. The cuckoo clock had stopped. Its two iron pinecones had descended almost to the floor. I reached up, took the other end of the chains and pulled them down. The cones climbed up to the little wooden house. At once the clock began to tick and, even before I could turn away, the door squeaked open and its tiny yellow bird whistled out. Cuckoo! I had always hated Mother’s cuckoo clock. So why had I wound it up?

The following morning I took stock. I had come back to see Mother and, in so doing, complete a filial duty that hadn’t been performed when it should have been. But in the meantime Mother’s body had been embalmed, transformed, which somehow altered the nature of my mission. Rather than feeling I had to see her urgently, I now found myself wondering whether I should be seeing her at all – seeing the corpse at all, I mean – since embalming was the last thing she would have wanted. Her sick and suffering body had been removed from me. The ritual I had imagined performing was no longer possible. Now there was the mockery of her looking very much her old self, in pale-blue tailleur and matching bonnet. Did I want to be a party to that?

To kill time, I sat on the sofa where I had sat so often during the summer of four years ago, looking across to the recliner where Mother had been more or less a permanent fixture when she wasn’t cooking shepherd’s pies and crumbles. It was a clunky thing with golden-brown upholstery. I hadn’t really noticed it when my mother was there in it. She had monopolised my attention. Only now she was gone did I see how ugly it was. The whole house, without my mother’s presence, was drab, and oddly heterogeneous. The surfaces were gathering dust.

Laptop on my knees, I exchanged emails with my brother, who was still resisting the idea of coming to the funeral. For the moment I did not write to the children, who did not write to me. I did not write to my wife. My ex-wife. I knelt for hours studying the books in the small revolving bookcase under the stairs. It was a mahogany thing, at least I think it was mahogany, that had once been at my grandfather’s house, and then at the vicarage where we grew up. On one side were children’s books from fifty years before. The Water Babies. Tales of the Riverside. I mean the editions were fifty years old. And fifty years ago I had knelt by this same bookcase and looked at these same books. On another side were yarns, as Mother called them, Biggles and Buchan and Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Again fifty years old. They were the books Mother had read aloud to us when we were ten or twelve. Kidnapped. Biggles Flies South. Safe books – The Thirty-Nine Steps – with war heroes and no sex. It was curious that she had kept them there, in their place in the revolving bookcase, even after moving out of the vicarage when my father died. They must have been taken off their shelves for the move, then carefully replaced in the same order, after the revolving bookcase was safely transferred from the spacious Victorian lounge where it had looked at home among drapes and draughts, to this miniature modern dwelling where a two-bar electric fire was topped by an illuminated plastic screen that vaguely recalled flames rising and flickering.

There were still cakes in the larder. I ate the last slices of a lemon sponge, cutting mould off one exposed surface. You could see Mother had made it herself from the way the icing was smeared on with a kitchen knife. From the mantelpiece above the fire, my father’s photo smiled at the room in black-and-white. I had hardly noticed him here when my mother was around. Now she was gone, he seemed to have taken over. He was wearing his robes and leaning forward, arms folded, on a wooden lectern, smiling generously towards some congregation, some gathering of people happy to listen to him and make him the centre of their attention. Every time I entered and left the room I felt compelled to look at my father. If the room had any anchor now, or animating principle – in the absence of my mother – it was Father, in his white surplice and black cassock leaning persuasively over the top of his lectern. At the bottom of the photo, resting against the frame, Mother had placed a piece of white card with these words:

Death hides –

But it cannot divide

Thou art but on

Christ’s other side.

Thou with Christ

And Christ with me

And so together

Still are we.

I ate the lemon cake and looked at Dad’s photo. You could see he was still in his forties here, because he had hair. And he wasn’t wearing bifocals. He seemed full of life and enthusiasm. It was odd, I thought, that the main photo Mum had preserved of him showed him in his public role, not in a moment of intimacy. Dad was a natural preacher; he would have been so, whatever he believed in. When he was preaching he was more seductive, perhaps, than in their private life. Was that true? Halfway up the stairs to the bedroom there was one of his favourite texts on a plaque:

But they that wait upon the LORD

shall renew their strength;

they shall mount up with wings as eagles;

they shall run, and not be weary;

they shall walk, and not faint.

My father had loved these powerful affirmations of religious optimism. But he had also loved the powerful words on the Churchill jug Mother preserved behind the glass door of the polished cabinet opposite the electric fire. ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,’ Churchill was saying and, on the other side of the jug, beneath a Spitfire in flight, ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’

My father loved powerful rhetoric of all kinds, and in his sermons strived in every way to reproduce a powerful rhetoric of his own. He lived in words, powerful words of praise and prayers and supplication. He loved preaching. He loved pronouncing the blessing at the end of evensong: ‘Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and without stain …’ He would raise his robed arms like angels’ wings and lift his face to heaven.

And because Father lived in words, he lived on in them too. Under the television was a box of audio cassettes. His sermons. Mother still had an ancient stereo unit with a cassette player. She perpetuated an old enchantment, listening to her dead husband’s sermons. Though never in my presence, as I recall. Never once had I caught my mother listening to them. She did not want that to happen. Perhaps she feared I would mock him. I would break the spell. There was a cassette in the player now.

In the afternoon I went to the West Middlesex and found Deborah on the sixth floor. She was sitting beside David’s bed reading the Daily Telegraph and The Lady. He was out of intensive care, but still heavily tubed up. ‘We’re supposed to keep talking to him,’ she said. The next few days would be critical. ‘Tom’s here, Dave!’ she announced in a loud voice. ‘He’s come all the way from Madrid to keep you company!’ She spoke as though he were suffering from deafness, or dementia. David was on his back, his greying hair in a ponytail, face blank and uncharacteristically peaceful. ‘Can you talk to him a bit while I take a break?’ Deborah asked. ‘We’re supposed to recall positive memories and speak in a gung-ho voice.’

So for the second time in a few days I was sitting beside a hospital bed with a person who was altogether out of it. I put my mouth close to his ear. ‘Are you there, Dave, old mate?’

My old friend’s expression was distant and calm. His skin still smelled faintly of his beloved nicotine. ‘You’ll have to wake up, if you want a fag,’ I told him. I watched and wondered. I wondered what on earth I could say that might penetrate a mind that had wanted to be dead. ‘Remember that girl,’ I tried, ‘you shagged in the Odeon in Richmond. With the piercings. Who drove you crazy for a year and more?’

I waited. It was strange noticing the quite different emotions of seeing Mother dying one day and David in a coma the next. With Mother I had been overwhelmed. Now I was absolutely cool. I had nothing to say. After a while Charlie appeared at the door. He smiled in a quiet kind of way. ‘Talk to him about cricket,’ he said. ‘Dad loves cricket.’ He spoke like the most loving of sons.

I used the buses to go to the West Middlesex. Two red buses, with a wintry connection in Isleworth. At the bus stop going home I exchanged messages with Elsa. ‘Miss dancing with you, Beauty.’ ‘Miss cooking with you.’ My fingers were numbed. I needed gloves. Elsa phoned, but neither of us were great talkers on the phone. I found myself inventing tasks to explain my stay, when actually I couldn’t even begin to explain it to myself and she wasn’t asking for explanations anyway. On the bus two Asian men were glued to a small box producing mournful Asian music. ‘This is a 281 to Hounslow Bus Station,’ a female voice warned. I told Elsa about Dave. He had been a close friend, I said. Years ago.

‘It’s strange, but his wife doesn’t seem too troubled with the situation.’

‘She’s talking about spending whatever it takes to nurse him back to health.’

But I couldn’t feel comfortable in Mother’s house. It felt so cold and poky. I found little meal packages she had prepared for herself, in the freezer compartment of the fridge. Moussaka. Chicken curry. Cauliflower cheese. They were the same recipes she had fed me with, overfed me, that summer four years ago. You are eating her remains, I thought.

I defrosted the packages in the microwave. There was a frozen gooseberry tart for dessert. I was overfeeding myself. I would get fat. When Mother did the dishes she never rinsed, just washed in soapy water, then dried things at once with ancient tea-towels. Washing up now, I left the cold tap running and rinsed everything thoroughly. When the freezer was empty, it would be empty and I would be free to eat other things.

One question was where to sleep. At the front of the house was Mother’s room, with the same double bed my parents had slept in decades before at the vicarage. This was the room she gave us when I visited with my wife. It was warm and cosy. But first I would have to strip the bed, which still had the sheets she had slept in.

In the bathroom there was the device she’d had installed to be sure to be able to climb out of the tub after she had taken a bath. It was a sort of seat with a crank. There was something medieval about it. A plaque on the wall above the toilet bowl said, This Toilet is twinned with a latrine at latitude 22.92730 longitude 90.15011 Aghailjhara, Bangladesh, Asia. There was a photo of a thin brown boy grinning from the door of a primitive outside loo, and the name of a charity. Mother always gave her tithe, even on a modest pension.

I am here

Where He placed me

For His purpose

Under His training

In His service

For His time.

When my mother was in the toilet – the bathroom, that is – she wouldn’t answer if you called her. You might let yourself in the front door and call her and, when she didn’t answer, you assumed she was out. You thought nothing of it. Then, with a sudden ‘cooee’, she appeared. She had been in the bathroom. A person urinating or defecating, or simply the other side of a toilet door, didn’t exist for my mother, wasn’t part of this world. ‘Hello, Thomas dear,’ she would call downstairs in her most cheery voice. ‘You’re back.’ But the person who was really back was Mother, back from the bathroom dimension where she didn’t exist.

I slept in the back bedroom beside the toilet. It was colder. It was also the only room without a text on the wall. This was where I had slept that famous summer. Looking out of the window, beyond the small yard, I could see a British Telecom depot where large yellow vans came and went at all hours. Long after midnight or in the early dawn they revved up and set off on their journeys, presumably to fix some communications failure. Sometimes the drivers called to each other, slamming doors, laughing, speaking in loud voices on their mobiles.

Mother had used the room as a study. There was a narrow bed against one wall and a desk against the other, with barely space for a chair between the two. There were papers on the desk. She had been preparing a Bible Study. Her big old Bible was still open on the table. The passage under discussion was Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’

I set up my computer on the desk and emailed the shrink to cancel our Friday appointments until further notice. Doing this, I felt as one who has ceased to take a powerful medicine and fears what the consequences might be. I was in free fall. What does St Paul mean, I wondered, by ‘then we shall see face to face?’ See whom face to face? Who is it that one normally sees through a glass darkly? More or less everybody. Wives, husbands. Lovers. Children. Myself even. Perhaps glass meant mirror. And when was it that one would see these people face to face? Surely not after death, when there would be no body and hence presumably no face. Are there mirrors in Paradise?

I felt a sudden yearning to go and confront Mother, to challenge her, in her coffin, face to face. What did St Paul mean, Mum? I would demand. But beside the yearning was revulsion. The last thing I wanted was to confront my mother. Her embalmed face. And behind the yearning and the revulsion, a profound indifference.

Under St Paul’s verses Mother had written, ‘Praise the Lord!’ Her handwriting was shaky but emphatic. I turned the paper over and picked up the pen beside it, the same pen she had been using, an ancient brushed-steel Sheaffer. Very likely it was the same pen my father had used, and already old-fashioned when he used it. A pen of thirty or forty years ago. Father always wrote with Sheaffers. I removed the cap and tried the nib. After a lick and a couple of strokes, it produced a thin line of blue-black ink. And I wrote:

Mother’s corpse. This is what I keep thinking about.

Should I view it?

Why can’t I decide?

XVI