In 1937, two years after Russell’s death, I had a dress rehearsal of the death that had haunted me from the time I was a child. For years Father had been nagging at me in his own quiet way to get hold of Mother’s birth certificate. At last, he wrote me a peremptory letter, and off I went, half angry, half amused, to the Custom House and wasted time searching for the entry of her birth where I felt it ought to be until I found it more or less where Father said it should be – seventy years back, all but a month or so. I was slightly shocked and very sad, because I had never thought her old at all, but she didn’t seem to take it personally. ‘Your poor dad will be so pleased,’ she said thoughtfully, evoking a very clear picture of Father’s boyish pride and the excitement with which he would report it to the family and friends.
She was staying with me at the time, and for the first birthday party she would remember I brought home a bottle of champagne. I should have had sense enough to realize the effect that even a glass of sherry could have on her. After supper I went for my usual walk. When I came home she was in the kitchen and she rushed out to greet me. Between the hall door and the kitchen there were seven or eight steps and before my eyes she tripped and tumbled down into the hall-way at my feet. When I tried to lift her she moaned, and I realized that she was badly injured. The McGarrys, who owned the house I lived in, carried her to bed and telephoned for Hayes. I was no help to them because I was hysterical. It seemed to me unbelievable coincidence that she should die after her first birthday party, and I blamed myself and my damned champagne.
Hayes arrived soon after and spent nearly half an hour in her room. I waited in the hall, and when he came out I saw from his look that he had no hope. He put his arm about me and drew me into the front room, shutting the door behind him. ‘It’s easier for you to hear this from me than from someone else,’ he said gently. ‘I’m afraid she isn’t going to live. Her shoulder and pelvis are broken, and I’ve never known an elderly person who survived it. Even if she did, she’d never walk again. All the same, she is a remarkable woman, and I’d be happier if we could get a specialist to see her. It’s late, but if I can get Charlie Macauley on the phone he may come. Charlie was very attached to his own mother.’
Macauley was at home and came out immediately. While we waited for him, Hayes said: ‘It’s extraordinary. Do you realize that that woman has had chronic appendicitis since she was a girl, and never even told a doctor about it.’ Macauley confirmed Hayes’ opinion and advised me not to expect the impossible. He insisted on getting her into a nursing home immediately, and about midnight the ambulance took her to one in Eccles Street. I walked home through the dark streets, knowing I should not sleep. I had to break the news to Father yet, and I knew he would blame me, as I blamed myself. And what made it hardest was to think of the stoicism with which she had all her life borne the pain of chronic appendicitis, knowing she could not afford to go to a doctor or take the time to enter a hospital.
When I saw her next day Mother was still resigned to death, but she got some very interesting stories from the nurses. On the following day she complained that she looked a sight and that the nurses could not do her hair, so I combed and brushed it for her. ‘A private room in a nursing home,’ she said, closing her eyes, ‘sure it must be costing a fortune,’ and anyhow, even from bed, she could look after me better than I could do for myself. I met Macauley outside her room and told him. ‘The funny thing is, she probably will go home,’ he said. ‘At this very moment I’m looking after a girl patient who did exactly the same thing to herself on the hunting field, and she’ll never walk again.’ It was ten days before Mother did come home, and then the McGarrys gave up their beautiful drawing-room on the ground floor to her. But she was very embarrassed at having to wear a dressing-gown when she went to and from the bathroom. ‘My goodness,’ she said, ‘you could meet anybody in that hall.’ After that, the dressing-gown was put away, and I had to dress and undress her as well as brush and put up her hair.
Meanwhile I had arranged to take my holiday in Switzerland, to see a specialist on my own account – a famous doctor who had been a friend of Thomas Mann at Davos – but Minnie Connolly’s letters from Cork were alarming. Father, well-informed by me about the gravity of the situation, had chosen it as an excuse for an uproarious drunk. I knew what life with him would be like while Mother couldn’t even climb a stair, much less go out to the pub to ‘get in’ for him. Instead, I took her with me to Switzerland. The journey, of course, was an intolerable chore. Mother was much too modest to look for the ‘Ladies’ herself; I had to find it and lead her to it. And, like all chores for her, it turned into joy. Mother made an intimate friend of the chambermaid in the London hotel, and got her life story from a nice girl she had chummed up with in Trafalgar Square. She disliked Paris, because no one could tell her any interesting life stories. Besides, she hated French coffee and broke into tears on me when I took her up to the Basilica in Montmartre and bought her some. However, Switzerland made up for it, and she liked to sit on the terrace of the hotel and listen to the crowds yodelling on the little pleasure boats passing up and down from Geneva and to go on the funicular to some little mountain chapel where she could say her prayers and listen to the cow-bells tinkling in the evening. She also made friends with a Swiss lady who spoke excellent English and was good enough to tell her the story of her life. It was all much more like home.
She cramped my style, for I had intended when I was finished with the doctor to tramp over one of the passes into Italy as Irish pilgrims had done in the seventh and eighth centuries, but still I felt a sort of enchantment in the holiday. It was like the fulfilment of a prophecy, the accidental keeping of promises made to her as a small boy, when she came in exhausted by a hard day’s work and I airily described to her – all out of a guide-book and a couple of phrase-books – the wonderful journeys we should make when I was older and had come into my own. And the enchantment was only sharpened by the feeling of guilt we both had when we worried about my foolish father staggering home in Harrington’s Square when the public-houses shut.
Father survived Mother’s absence, but on her return he made it clear that he thought I had had more than my share of her. Life in Harrington’s Square was restored to its rigid pattern more firmly than ever, despite Mother’s wistful reminiscences of the Continent. It was some years before the occasion Father had been looking forward to for so long occurred, and I found myself responsible for a woman and her son, waiting for the end of ecclesiastical and divorce court proceedings so that I could marry. Of course, I had been asking for that. You can’t live on two levels – the level of the imagination in what concerns yourself and the level of reason in what concerns others – for sooner or later the two will change places; and no consideration of expediency had ever really deterred me from getting into situations which my experience did not qualify me to deal with. Every humiliation that can be inflicted on a man who tries to live by his imagination and doesn’t know the rules of the group to which he aspires I had gone through, and this was merely the greatest of them.
Mother came to stay and was reassured, as I knew she would be, for she could deal with any situation, no matter how preposterous from her point of view, so long as she could size it up for herself. After she went back, it was Father’s turn, because somehow or other my life would not have been complete unless he had seen me in my new part as a father myself. I think now that perhaps I built too much on that; perhaps I always built too much on his visits, hoping each time that at last things between us would be as they should have been from the start and that I could confide in him things I could not have confided even in Mother. When I rushed to open the carriage door for him, he staggered out, very drunk. He must have been all right before he left home or Mother would have kept him there, but he had had a long wait at Waterford for a connexion, and boredom or nervousness had proved too much for him.
I got him home and put him to bed, but not before the child had seen him. I knew the boy’s look because it had been my own at his age, and faced with this disaster I wasn’t a day older than he. I knew I couldn’t control Father; nobody could control him when he was like that, and I lay awake, shivering as if in a fever and going through the whole nightmare of my childhood again. I must have fallen asleep, for in the early hours of the morning I found he had got out, and knew what had happened. He was rambling mad through the countryside, looking for a public-house and hammering at the door for drink. Later I went to search for him and when I found him said, ‘This can’t go on. I have trouble enough in this place already.’ ‘I know, I know,’ he muttered stupidly. ‘I shouldn’t have come. I’ll go back by the next train. I’ll be better at home.’ ‘I’m afraid you will,’ I said, and later that day saw him off from the little station. My heart was torn with pity and remorse because I knew that was no way to behave to a dog, let alone to someone you loved, and yet I could not control the childish terror and hatred that he had instilled into me so long ago when he threw us out in our nightclothes on the street, or attacked Mother with an open razor.
I never saw him again. A few weeks later war broke out and communications collapsed. What was worse for people of Father’s generation, tea was rationed to a fraction of what people in Britain were allowed, and when he wasn’t on the booze he had nothing else to drink. It was part of the poverty of our class that we grew up literally on bread and tea and never really felt hungry if we had enough of both. Mother and Father did what the rest of their generation did and left the tea-leaves in the pot to be watered again and again till the last colouring had gone from them. When I worried about it, it wasn’t of Mother but of him I was thinking, for apart from liquor he had no other resource.
He died as he had lived, blundering drunk about Cork in the last stages of pneumonia, sustained by nothing but his giant physique (my cousin Christy, who looked after him, told me at the funeral about the big black stain that appeared about his heart when he died). Mother refused to tell me anything until he was dead. This was something I found hard to forgive, because though with half her mind she felt she was saving me anxiety, deep down there was something else, not far removed from resentment – the feeling that I wouldn’t understand and that I never had understood. She was like a loving woman who, when her husband has been unfaithful to her, blames not the husband, but the other woman. ‘That damned drink!’ she would cry bitterly, always implying that it was the drink that followed Father, not Father the drink, and in this she was probably wiser than I. But she felt that only she could have the patience to deal with him when he was dying and to realize that he must be allowed to die in his own way, not mine, as in later years she followed him with Masses and prayers, knowing as no one else could know, how lost and embarrassed that shy, home-keeping man would be with no Minnie O’Connor to come home to, no home, no Cork, no pension, astray in the infinite wastes of eternity.