An Indian wearing a turban came for the mongoose and took it away under his coat. The kitchen kept much cleaner without it: I didn’t kick saucers of milk across the floor when I was in a hurry. The Indian gave me a bottle of scent because he thought I’d been kind to his mongoose; but I hadn’t, so I gave it to Mrs Churchill, who had really liked the little creature. She liked the scent, too, which was a good thing because Father had hurt her feelings and called her ‘a filthy old hag’ when he found her polishing his surgery floor with her cloth cap on the end of a mop.
The flowers were still alive in Mother’s room, and she lay there, quite quiet, looking at them. She had talked so much the previous evening that she was exhausted, too tired even to eat her grapes, though I think she liked to know they were there. The doctor came and, when he was leaving, managed to catch Father in the hall. They went into the dining-room together, and I could hear their rumbling voices as I prepared the animals’ meat in the kitchen. Little Hank came for the bowls, one by one. He was a very undersized boy, perhaps because he did not have sufficient food. His mother was a poor Dutch widow who had somehow become stranded in Clapham, and Hank was the eldest of a family of five boys. Often I would find him munching dog biscuits behind the door, and once a raw herring. Sometimes his mother would pass our house and I’d see her with her hat on the back of her untidy head and all the little boys, who seemed to be wearing boots much too large, clattering after her. I think they must have worn iron heels because they sounded rather like little horses.
Lucy came round in the afternoon. She said her mother had sent her out because her eyes ached so much from sewing mourning clothes in a great hurry. She rather sadly said with her hands, ‘I don’t want to lose my eyesight as well as hearing and speaking.’ But she cheered up over our tea in the kitchen and told me she was going to be a dressmaker apprentice in a large shop in Bayswater. ‘You see, Mother is giving up the dressmaking and it will be a wonderful chance for me. They even make Court gowns.’ Then she produced a fortune-telling tape-measure and we laughed a lot over it. My waist measurement said, ‘Next year’, and my wrist ‘He loves you’, and my nose ‘A sailor’, and my head ‘You will be surprised’. We were still laughing when I heard Father come in and I knew our happy time was over and I would have to get Lucy out of the house quickly. I heard him go into the surgery, and that gave Lucy a chance to escape. As we passed through the hall we saw his black leather case on the table. Sometimes brown would show through the black and Mother would polish it with black boot-polish. If any got on the handles there was trouble, because it came on Father’s gloves, which were often meant to be yellow.
Lucy had gone when Father came out of the surgery. Instead of coming to the kitchen to demand tea he went upstairs and, to my amazement, into Mother’s room. It was the first time he had been there since she became ill. I could hardly believe it. I stood at the bottom of the stairs and could hear their voices. I thought I heard her say, ‘It’s not right. Oh, Euan!’ Then later, ‘Please be kind to Alice. It would be best to send her away from here.’ Father wasn’t shouting or in a temper – in fact, his voice was very quiet – so I returned to the kitchen and grilled two chops and two tomatoes cut in half, real English ones. I could tell they were English because the little green piece you pull off smelt fresh and tomatoey.
Father came downstairs and went into his surgery. Although he could smell food cooking, he left the house almost immediately. Later I went up to Mother, but she was asleep, just a mound in her brass bed. The house was quiet. Even the animals were still, and I almost wished the parrot would start his dreadful laughter. Father didn’t return and Mother still slept. Her breathing became heavy. I kept imagining I could hear it in other rooms and wished Mrs Churchill were there to tell me about her flowers. ‘A great striped dahlia, dear, twelve inches across – and there are nine buds to come. Did I tell you about my early chrysanthemums that I grew from cuttings a park-keeper let me have?’ she would say dreamily over a cup of mahogany tea; and I would stare at her pink hair-combs, half-hypnotised and strangely comforted. There was no Mrs Churchill to comfort me, but, when I took the dogs to lift their legs on the red arch, it seemed better because I met people walking up the hill. In one gas lamp there were some crickets chirping, or there may have been something wrong with the gas, but I hoped it was crickets. When I turned into our road, I thought I saw a figure waving from the doorstep and I was afraid again in case it was something terrible. It twisted and turned like some dreadful shadow. I called, ‘I’m coming’; but it went on twisting and turning, and my legs wouldn’t walk properly. Then, when I was near, I saw it was really a shadow from a large flag that someone had nailed to a post in their garden and was fluttering and waving in the night.
I went into the house and put the three dogs in their cages. Usually they whined at first, but this evening they quietly settled down on their straw and curled up neatly. An old white cock with a swollen eye pushed his head through the bars of his pen, and I gave him a few grains of Indian corn which he pecked from my hand. He was a child’s pet and very tame for a cock – much tamer than the parrot, who nipped and pecked me on every occasion. Then I covered the parrot up with the flannel petticoat. There were only the trays to lay for the morning, but I lingered over the animals because I didn’t want the house to be filled with breathing.
As I climbed upstairs I could hear the breathing again, now that everything in the house was still. I went to Mother’s room and she was still asleep. Her face was flushed, and her breathing was certainly very loud. Although it seemed cruel, I shook her; but she still stayed asleep and the heavy breathing seemed to come louder. I didn’t know if it was a good thing, all this heavy-breathing sleep, or if I should send for the doctor although it was so late at night. I even wished Father would come home and tell me what to do. Eventually I left her well propped up with pillows so that she would not suffocate and went to bed. Even with the door closed the sound of breathing seemed to be there.
I was so tired I slept nearly as soundly as Mother, but a rattling, snoring sound seemed to come in my dreams. Suddenly I was awake and knew it had stopped, and everywhere was very silent. Then I heard Father return and creep up to his room, although the night had nearly gone and light was coming.
The next time I woke up it was quite late in the morning and I realised I’d overslept. Already I could hear Father’s voice, and there seemed to be several people creeping about the stairs. When I was half-dressed, I opened my door a chink. I saw a strange woman with an enamel jug of water in her hand. She went into Mother’s room and firmly closed the door. When I was dressed I went downstairs expecting great trouble to come because I hadn’t taken Father’s breakfast up to his room. Already he was down in the dining-room talking to someone. As I passed the room, the door was suddenly opened by the little old doctor. He beckoned to me with his yellow, wrinkled hand and said, ‘Come here, missy, I want you.’
I went in and the morning sun was making a Jacob’s ladder right across the room. Father was leaning on the mantelpiece with his back to me, and his clothes, which usually looked so fine and smooth, were all wrinkled as if he had slept in them. The doctor started asking me questions. Had I given Mother any of the pills that were to relieve her pain? Exactly what had she had to eat and drink after his visit yesterday? When had I last seen her and how had she seemed? I answered the first questions, but, when it came to the third question, I started to cry and said I knew now I should have sent for him. I tried to explain my confused feelings and how I had not known what to do for the best. I told him about the breathing, and how I was not sure if I could really hear it or imagined it because I was afraid. I told him how I’d propped Mother up with pillows and tried to wake her. ‘But she hasn’t suffocated?’ I wailed. ‘Please don’t say she has suffocated. I saw a strange woman with hot water: surely she wouldn’t need hot water if she had suffocated?’
It was then that the doctor told me that Mother had died in her sleep and there was nothing I could have done to save her. He kept patting me with his old wrinkled hands, and tried to bring comfort by telling me how much she would have suffered if she had lived the last two or three weeks, which was the most she could have lasted.
As I stumbled from the room a dreadful thought came and filled me with horror. Perhaps Father had given Mother something to put her to sleep, just as he put the animals to sleep that the vivisectionist did not need for his experiments. Mother really had gone to sleep, but the animals were given poison on their tongues, although he called it ‘putting them to sleep’.
During the morning a man came to measure Mother for her coffin. It was the same man we had sent away two days before.