From being someone with time on her hands, happy to get company when she could, Mrs P has become rather difficult to get hold of, a person you need to make an appointment with. She has even turned down a number of meetings, refusing to see people who came explicitly to speak to her. I myself had been wondering for some days when would be the right time for me to make the journey to see Mrs P, if only because it appeared that the time when she would not be seeing people at all might not be so far off. I made frequent attempts to phone her, but she was well defended by administrative staff. On two occasions I was told I could speak to Mrs P if I were willing to accept responsibility for waking her up, but, given her increasing reluctance to respond favourably to the demands made on her, I decided this might be unwise.
Eventually, fearing that a window of opportunity was narrowing and that someone it had once been all too easy to talk to had now become remote and was threatening to become infinitely more so, I booked a flight and made all necessary arrangements to reach Mrs P’s new place of residence. My ticket paid for, I tried again to phone to fix an appointment and, as always, was told by a young female voice that she would have to check whether Mrs P was able to take my call. What euphemisms! And of course it appeared she was not able. I was invited to call back in an hour’s time, which I did. And then in ten minutes. It was frustrating. But at my fourth or fifth attempt, Mrs P’s guardians finally told me she was now willing to take my call and so I spoke to her for the first time in quite a while.
‘Thomas,’ she said. Her voice sounded odd. Posher than I remembered it, more formal. Perhaps due to her changed circumstances, I thought, and the increased pressure on her agenda.
‘I’m coming to see you tomorrow,’ I informed her, perhaps presumptuously.
‘Oh, you are coming, are you?’ she said. ‘Tomorrow?’
It was difficult to judge her mood. On the one hand she seemed relieved, even pleased perhaps, but on the other perturbed, as if this information – my peremptory decision to come and see her after an absence of some six weeks – were rather ominous.
‘At what time?’ she asked, continuing with this curiously correct Queen’s English she was adopting.
I told her around two.
‘We shall see each other tomorrow, then,’ she said and ended the call abruptly.
The following day I boarded a morning flight, landed at Heathrow, found my bus stop and bus and alighted forty minutes later at a small railway station, whence on foot the half-mile or so to where Mrs P had recently moved her residence and was receiving the few visitors she was now willing to grant time to. Needless to say, I had to sign in and declare my intentions and relationship with Mrs P, which I duly did, feeling at once how powerfully defining that relationship was for me, and how the forthcoming meeting, whatever its tenor, could only reinforce the importance Mrs P had always had in my life.
I should go to room 3, I was told.
The door was on the left, a stained-wood double door in a corridor typical of certain institutions, neither attractive nor drab, but determinedly functional. Her name was posted on the door – a printed card in a nameplate holder – in very much the manner that my name is posted on the door of the office in the organisation where I work. This was a novelty, I thought, for Mrs P, and indicated she had moved into a different league. When had I ever seen her name on a nameplate before? I knocked on the door and after a brief, respectful pause, during which there was no perceptible response, pressed down the handle and entered.
Mrs P was much changed, and at once the reason why she had not reacted to my knocking was apparent. Half seated, half reclining, she was asleep. It seemed a troubled sleep of uneven breathing and sharp twitches, in particular of her naked left arm, which, mottled and flaccid, was looped about by a white wire, at the end of which a small plastic box with a red button presumably enabled her to call and command the administrative staff. What most, however, attracted my dismayed attention was her mouth, which had sunk drastically into her face. Wrinkled and bloodless, the lower lip appeared to have been sucked back over the gums and down into the trembling darkness of her deep drawn breath. She was not wearing her lower denture.
Dutifully, I sat beside her bed, which was clearly an expensive item complete with various gadgets of advanced technology. I stood, removed my coat, hung it on the back of the seat and sat again. Waiting for her to wake, I took in the room that her changed status had assigned her. There were three or four chairs, of which one was an elaborate recliner. There was a French window and beyond it a patch of patio complete with a modest fountain, whose soft splashing mingled with the sounds of Mrs P’s breathing. It was by no means an unpleasant place to be.
For a while, then, I sat still, absorbing all the transformations that had overcome Mrs P since our last, rather happy meeting, in her tiny terraced house. I should let her sleep, I thought. She looked in need of a long rest. Then I remembered that I would not be the only one with an appointment this afternoon. It was already 2.45. Very soon other people would appear on the scene and this privileged moment would be gone, perhaps never to return. I stood and leaned over her. I was intensely aware of a new whiteness, wanness rather, in her skin, and of how thickly pleated it had become at the corners of lips and eyes. I shook her shoulder through the white nightdress, noticing that the blanket covering her legs, waist and lower chest was a rather improbable fuchsia colour. Indeed, its intensity made everything else in the room seem colourless, as if it were drawing all life and warmth into itself to keep Mrs P cosy.
‘Mum?’
For some reason I had assumed it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to wake her; I am prone, I believe, to what psychologists have dubbed ‘catastrophic thinking’. But the eyes opened at once. And how blue they were and clear, an immediate reminder of the charisma that had always hung around Mrs P and made her, in her modest way, a rather formidable person. Her lids fluttered open and the eyes focused.
‘Thomas.’
Mrs P is the only person in the world to call me Thomas, rather than Tom, or Tommy, perhaps the only person who feels, without even being aware of it, that she has the right to call me what she likes, without negotiation.
‘Good heavens. What time is it?’ Her eyes went to the clock on the opposite wall. She squinted.
‘Two forty-five,’ I said. She seemed perplexed. Realising she wasn’t wearing her hearing aid, I repeated, ‘Two forty-five, Mum!’
‘But it can’t be. Did I fall asleep?’
She smiled, and the transformation was remarkable. What had seemed the face of a breathing corpse was now full of warmth and mobility. Clumsily, I bent down and embraced her white hair.
‘Thomas,’ she repeated. ‘Thomas.’
It was the missing denture that gave her the posher accent.
‘Mum,’ I told her.
‘Is Mary with you?’
‘She couldn’t make it,’ I said.
‘Ah,’ she frowned.
Sitting beside her, smiling, I demanded that she explain these drastically altered circumstances. What had happened? And she told, albeit with some effort and failures of memory, the same story I had already heard from other sources: namely, her fall on the stairs at home, the days of increasing pain and immobility that had ensued, her eventual removal to hospital, the doctors’ difficulty distinguishing between creeping cancer and immediate back injuries, a period staying at my sister’s house that, despite everyone’s goodwill, had been neither easy nor happy, then her eventual transferral to this charitable institution.
‘They are wonderful here,’ she told me with a sigh. ‘They are so kind.’
‘That’s great,’ I agreed.
‘And how is Mary?’ She spoke with a false brightness, on automatic pilot.
‘Mary’s fine,’ I said. ‘Just fine. The kids too.’
She looked hard at me, as if sensing something was wrong.
‘I’m living away from home now, remember? While we think about things.’
She hesitated. ‘Of course,’ she said, but still looked puzzled.
‘It’s all fine,’ I said. ‘Things will sort themselves out.’
Then she asked me how long would I be staying, and I replied that I had a return flight the following evening, since the morning after that – the day after tomorrow – I had to be at an important meeting with a new client. She seemed to reflect on this for some time, as if weighing up information of great import.
‘I see,’ she said at last, and I understood that what she had seen was that if I did in fact catch the plane tomorrow evening, this would almost certainly be our last meeting.
‘I’m glad to be here, Mum,’ I said hurriedly. ‘I’m so glad to be here with you.’
She smiled and again that unexpected vitality rose to her face. Perhaps she would indeed go on for ever, I thought, as my brother had always maintained. I stood and leaned over her. I wanted to embrace her. But there was a railing along the side of the bed and though she struggled for a moment she was unable to sit up. In the end I bowed over the railing and bent down to her white head.
‘It’s so good to see you,’ I repeated. ‘You’re a fantastic mother, Mrs P.’
Speaking close to her ear, my chest almost smothering her face, I was struck by the size of the lobe, which seemed to have grown quite disproportionately, and by the quality of her grey hair, which had become finer, with a faint and rather mysterious yellow hue.
‘What is it? Are you in pain?’
She shook her head under my smothering breast – I was wearing a heavy woollen sweater – but it seemed she had begun to cry.
Rather clumsily I said, ‘Don’t worry about me and Mary, Mum. We’ll be okay.’
I spoke very close to her ear and very clearly. I didn’t want her to have to struggle to understand. And I asked: ‘Aren’t you happy to see me? It’s good to be with you again.’
Her weeping intensified. Perhaps it was the fact that my embrace was covering her face that allowed this to happen, since in the normal way of things Mrs P did not cry in front of others, and certainly never sobbed. It had always been important for Mrs P not to impose – for this is doubtless how she saw it – her weeping, her suffering, on others; not to stoop, or perhaps simply give way, to this form of manipulation. Which I suppose suggests that she did feel tempted so to stoop, tempted to weep. But perhaps this was all my interpretation, recalling the moment forty and more years ago when through tears – one of the very few times I had seen Mrs P cry – she had said to me, ‘If you go on like this, Thomas, you will bring me down with grey hairs to my grave.’ That is how I remember her words, though years later, checking in Cruden’s Concordance, I discovered that the biblical text she was quoting actually reads ‘bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave’, and it is hard, honestly, to imagine that Mrs P would ever quote a biblical verse wrongly. No doubt my memory is at fault. Certainly I have no idea now what it was exactly I had done, aged seventeen, to deserve this remonstration, though vaguely I sense it must have had to do with my brother, whose rebellious and unchristian behaviour, as they saw it, had caused my parents much grief, and in fact when I checked the quotation in Cruden’s, tracking it down through the unusual plural ‘hairs’, it was to find that the words were spoken by Jacob when he feared he would lose his youngest son Benjamin as well as his next youngest, Joseph. In fact the verse begins, ‘And if ye take this [Benjamin] also from me … ye shall bring down my gray hairs’ … etc. So in echoing those words Mrs P, consciously or otherwise, was accepting as given the loss of one son, my brother, and expressing the anguished fear that another, her youngest, would go the same way.
This will seem a long digression, but now here I was embracing Mrs P’s grey hairs that had indeed been brought down, if not to the grave, then to a hospice bed, which is the closest thing. And she was in tears.
Voices came into the room from the corridor now. Two nurses hurried by the open door and further away a vacuum cleaner was whining.
‘Are you happy to see me?’ I asked again, and in asking that I knew I was betraying anxiety. I spoke close to her ear.
‘Of course,’ Mrs P whispered. ‘Only …’
I held the embrace. I felt very self-conscious; all this had been foreseen.
‘Only’ – her head was shaking under my chest – ‘you don’t love the Lord Jesus, Thomas. I keep thinking that, and it grieves me. More than anything else in the world.’
So this was it. Here we were. This was the hurdle that had to be negotiated before Mrs P and I could part. I had agonised for weeks before telling her my marriage had fallen apart, but what really mattered was my not being Christian, my not loving, or even acknowledging, the Lord Jesus, unless perhaps the two problems were the same, since only someone who did not love the Lord Jesus, or only a man who had no faith in God, would end up in this way. A son of Mrs P’s should know that.
In any event, this was the problem and the fact that we were confronting it, or she was – since for me there was nothing to confront but her need to confront me with it – indicated that she at least felt sure that this really was our last meeting. Suddenly overwhelmed by emotion, I too began to cry, though in a different way from Mrs P. Tears ran freely down my cheeks; it seemed mad that it wasn’t enough for her to suffer the pains and humiliation of her sickness; she also had to worry about my marriage and my soul.
‘It grieves me, Thomas,’ she repeated. ‘It makes everything more difficult.’
My embracing her, I’m sure, hiding her face as I bent over her hair to speak in her far ear, had made this outburst possible; opened, as they say, the floodgates. And the drama had come so much sooner than I expected. After all, I was barely through the door. We had barely said anything to each other. Apparently she felt she had to act immediately. Any waiting would be folly. ‘It grieves me,’ she said again. And the challenge for me now was to avoid the mistake that I had made when the same scene had presented itself – almost the same scene – with the Reverend P, my father, thirty-two years before and just a few months after he had pronounced myself and Mary man and wife. But his cancer had been more aggressive, more rapid, and he had not enjoyed the same level of care. In fact it was in the vicarage bedroom where he and Mrs P slept together that he had begged me to convert before he died and I had told him, petulantly, that it was unfair of him to use his suffering to sway my mind, thus adding unkindness to the many pains, physical and psychological, he was already dealing with.
Fortunately, I had had more time to rehearse for this appointment. I was older. So now, to Mrs P, I said, ‘Life is long, Mum, who knows what I will believe or become in the future. Or even whether Mary and I will get together again. You rest now. You need to rest.’
Mrs P went on weeping, but wordlessly. I was at a loss, reflecting that rather than being shorter than I had feared, this appointment was already beginning to feel longer than I could be easy with. Still speaking close to this strangely large ear, I muttered, ‘We each have our own journey, Mum.’
This was false. It was a platitude. It was not the kind of thing Mrs P’s son would normally say. And the very falseness prompted me to add, ‘Forgive me for being unkind.’
Perhaps Mrs P realised I was floundering, for she rather abruptly stopped crying and somehow communicated to me that the moment was over and that my embrace, hiding her face, was no longer necessary or appropriate.
Stepping back, it occurred to me that Mrs P now felt a little guilty for having pushed me into producing first a platitude then this half-hearted request for forgiveness. The truth is that Mrs P harbours unlimited reservoirs of guilt just waiting to find a breach and gush out. She felt guilty for having invited me to contemplate my ‘guilt’, my responsibility, as she saw it, for her unhappiness, thus making me guilty of prevarication. I couldn’t help smiling through my own drying tears. The sheer conflictedness, if that is a word, of Mrs P’s behaviour has often been a cause of endearment. I sat down.
‘I’m so glad to be here,’ I said more frankly. This was true, I was glad. ‘Glad to be with you, Mum.’
It took her a moment to return to herself. She was aware I was now seeing her tears. But her face was unclouding, the unhappy contortion of her weeping was smoothing out, so it seemed to me she too was glad now, glad, as it were, to have got it over with, to have said her piece, her very last piece about my lack of faith. However much grief it brought her, no more need be said on the matter. The business of our appointment was done. She had felt duty-bound to make that play, to reopen negotiations one more time, one last time, in the hope that something in me might finally give; yet no sooner had she made the play than she felt it had been wrong to make it. So now she was relieved that, having done what she had, she was free to stop doing it. This is the sort of sick, messed-up atmosphere you grew up in, I thought, and simultaneously I also thought what a long way Mrs P and I had come from the days of my adolescence when she had talked so melodramatically of grey hair and graves; how civilised we now were, like two countries who still dispute a crucial stretch of border territory and will never renounce their claims – on the contrary: at every crisis those claims will be aired and pressed – yet deep down both have accepted that nothing will ever shift in this dispute, no armies will march or missiles fly, so they might as well get on with the normal trade that makes life pleasurable and profitable, if nothing else because they are neighbours. And we were mother and son.
‘It’s lovely to see you, Thomas,’ Mrs P said.
‘Mum,’ I cried, delighted.
‘No Scrabble, though, alas.’
Here she did something with her face that beggars description. The truth is that Mrs P has always been a good girl. Mrs P has never knowingly broken any rule or law or misbehaved in any way. Yet now she sought to put on a mischievous expression, half wink, half smirk, as of complicity between malefactors, an expression that was meant to amuse: here we are on the brink of eternity, Thomas, lamenting the absence of Scrabble. Aren’t we naughty!
I knew the look, of course, knew it of old and the emotions it aroused, though I had never seen it on this new and changed face of hers, this mask of suffering and death, which gave it an unreal quality; all the more so for the intense transparency of her blue eyes, something, I was aware, that had much to do with the operations to remove her cataracts of three and four years before.
‘I loved a game of Scrabble,’ she sighed.
‘So I’ll go and get a board,’ I said, deadpan. ‘I’m sure they have board games here.’
She looked disappointed. ‘Bored?’ Then she guessed she hadn’t heard correctly. ‘I’m too tired to be bored, love.’
‘I said, I’ll go and get a Scrabble board. Scrabble.’
She saw I was laughing.
‘Perhaps I’ll have the beating of you, at last,’ I cried.
She looked at me, melancholy and perplexed, and I realised she was too tired for banter. I always lost to Mrs P at Scrabble. Putting my hand through the railing, I took hers, which was whitely fleshy and worryingly cold. I squeezed and she squeezed faintly back and at once her eyes closed and the lower lip sank back into the mouth and she was asleep.
I always lost at Scrabble to Mrs P because she had a sharp mind, was formidably competitive and played a great deal more than I did. The triple-letter and, above all, the triple-word scores were constantly present to her. But the pious person who wishes to compete has to choose her opponents carefully. I’m sure Mrs P enjoyed playing my brother far more than she enjoyed playing me, because he is more or less unbeatable at any board game and so she could compete with him to the very best of her ability without fearing the guilt she would always feel when she won with me. My brother would never grant to anybody a single point more than was necessary. By the same token Mrs P would never have felt the need to challenge my brother on his lack of faith since he made it scathingly clear that he was beyond such challenges. Conversely, with my sister, the eldest of the three, Mrs P would never play Scrabble at all, since it was generally understood – and indeed broadcast to the four winds, above all by my sister herself – that she was not ‘brainy’ (her word), hence to play her at something like Scrabble would have entailed a massacre. Likewise, there was no need to challenge my sister on her faith, since she had it in abundance. My sister was a pillar of faith; in proportion, my brother had sometimes cruelly suggested, as she was not ‘brainy’. There was always a great confusion surrounding piety and intellect in our family, to the point that no one was ever really sure if there wasn’t a touch of devilry in every intelligence and a touch of dumbness in every piety. All the same, you had to be one or the other, either smart or good. No member of the family could ever have contemplated being neither intelligent nor pious. Only the Reverend P had somehow contrived to be both but he had died shortly after his sixtieth birthday, leaving the field divided.
In any event, whenever Mrs P started winning at Scrabble – and with me this would generally happen around moves five and six as the ramifying letters reached out towards the triple-word scores – whenever the points that separated us, which she diligently recorded with a system of pegs at the top of her letter holder, started to look decisive, Mrs P would step in on my side with generous suggestions: Did I have an S, she would ask, to build a word on the end of ‘altar’ over to the double-word score? Or did I have a K to create something on the top of ‘nave’? Then it was fascinating to watch her helping me out, or trying to, seeking to protect me from any possible feelings of embarrassment at my ineptitude, while at the same time never renouncing the idea of winning, because in the end, as I said, and however much against her better instincts, she couldn’t help competing, couldn’t help wanting to win, just as she hadn’t been able to help wanting to convince me, in extremis, to give my hard heart to Jesus. What a victory that would have been! Meantime, back with the Scrabble, I might have sunk half a bottle of wine or more, or the over-sweet sherry she liked, so that the letters I had pulled out of the bag began to seem a little soft at the edges, simply refusing to organise themselves into recognisable patterns, and anyway it was far more interesting following this back and forth of Mrs P’s, as she was torn between beating me and protecting me, than trying to follow the growing tangle of words on the board. The truth is Scrabble always bored me.
Now Mrs P slept. I held her left hand. The arm was swollen with lymph; it was heavy and fatty. Below her neck, above her nightdress, were traces of inflammation and patches of dressing. Removing the breasts, some years before, had not prevented the cancer from invading her chest. She had gone to the doctors too late. There were open and ‘weeping’ tumours, she once told me. ‘Ugly and smelly.’ Mrs P rarely spoke about such things, but when she did, she was blunt and to the point, so that now, thinking of her poor offended body, I remembered a conversation we had had about a year before, perhaps over one of those games of Scrabble, about the mind and the body. I had insisted, rather zealously, that mind and body were one, only existing as separate entities in the precarious system language is. ‘Quite simply we are our bodies,’ I had declared emphatically. ‘And our bodies are us.’ But Mrs P had objected that this just couldn’t be true. Her body aged and declined, she said, and the more it did so, the more she felt separate from it. She was not her cancer. And she felt sure the soul enjoyed eternal life and that her body would remain on this earth until the Resurrection Day, while her soul would be taken up to be with the Lord, in paradise.
I looked at her body now on this hi-tech bed in Woking Hospice; there was an intermittent twitch in her left shoulder and her legs too twitched at the knee from time to time, and I asked myself if Mrs P was indeed to be entirely and absolutely identified with this suffering body. I started to think about this, but the more I did so – the more I tried to bring some lucid thinking to this ancient chestnut, the relationship between mind and body, self and flesh – the more the question seemed completely meaningless, merely part of a will to unhappiness on my part, or to mental troublemaking. Changing changing changing, at every moment Mrs P nevertheless remained Mrs P, my Mrs P, her recognisable self. Now a suffering woman dozing in a hospice bed. To what end pursue the matter further? What purpose would be served by leaning to this or that unverifiable hypothesis? The important thing was to be with Mrs P now in this brief space that remained to us.
My eye moved over her with a kind of wonder at what she had become, what she was becoming; then it moved across the room to the chairs, the swing table the other side of the bed with its plastic baby bottles for drinking without spills, the rose-patterned curtains, a loudly ticking wall-clock, some official notices pinned on a board just a little too far away for me to read but nevertheless conveying a sense of restriction and institutional imperatives. They would be about things one must not do.
Then my eye came back to the bedside table. A radio. A white water jug, the phone, and beside the phone a book: What To Do When Faith Seems Weak & Victory Lost, by Kenneth E Hagin. This troubled me. Why was she reading this book? Not out of need, surely? I did not want Mrs P to lose her faith at the end. She had wanted me to find faith, something that didn’t interest me in the slightest, the Christian story seems grotesque to me. But just the thought that she might doubt her faith, and doubt it now, at the end, bewildered me, horrified me. Registering the intensity of this reaction, I was obliged to acknowledge that I counted on her faith. I had faith in Mrs P’s faith. How odd, I thought, that I needed someone else to go on believing something I myself not only didn’t believe, but couldn’t even really rouse any interest in; in order, presumably, that things would remain the same, that the people around me all stay in their proper places. Which was perhaps why others needed me to stay with Mary.
I picked up the book, which was not a slim volume, and turned it over in my hands. I read the title again. The words were printed over a photoshopped image of an iron shield with a sword lying across it. It was a battle, a competition, then. But, unlike Scrabble, a battle one couldn’t afford to lose. When faith seems weak, I noticed now. Not is weak. When victory seems lost, but in fact is still victory. It was a curious title, naming a crisis, but at the same time suggesting it wasn’t a real crisis. Only a seems. Defeat wasn’t really contemplated. Though of course something needed to be done. Otherwise why read the book? What, though? What did one do to bolster one’s faith? I had no intention of finding out. The book wasn’t addressed to me, to someone who had no faith that might one day be, or merely seem, weak, to a man, in short, so faithless as to contemplate leaving his wife of thirty-two years. Anyway, whatever it was that needed doing, I thought, Mrs P, could be counted on to be doing it, or to have already done it. She would have read Kenneth E Hagin’s advice carefully. She would have taken all appropriate steps. No, the important thing for Mrs P was to take her faith along with her grey hairs to the grave. For my sake as much as for hers. Because it was impossible to imagine Mrs P without faith. She would become someone else and then I too would have to change. Even the erratic course I steered, perhaps, made a little sense in relation to her steadfastness. And as I was thinking these odd thoughts, my sister walked into the room and my privileged time with Mrs P was over.
My sister was also much changed, but then I hadn’t seen her for rather longer. Some years. She had lost weight, she had dyed her hair honey blonde and put in pink highlights. She looked well and, with discreetly applied makeup, much younger than her sixty-three years. Mrs P, I immediately thought, had never dyed her hair, or applied make-up. In fact it was even less imaginable that Mrs P dye her hair, than that she lose her faith. For some reason the two did not seem unconnected; although, as I said before, my sister is the most religious of the three children and has always dyed hers, or at least ever since the various calamities that overwhelmed her in her thirties and caused her to go prematurely grey. Now, after briefly but warmly greeting me, she went round to the other side of the bed, leaned over Mrs P and stroked her hair, and assured her in the voice of one speaking to a child that all was well, that the Lord Jesus was looking after her, that He would never let her down and that she mustn’t worry about needing to entertain us or look after us. She didn’t. We required nothing of her, there was nothing she need do but relax and lie there.
I was a little surprised that my sister felt the need to say all this, since Mrs P had shown no signs of being anxious to entertain us, though it was true that this had been her constant, lifelong concern when visitors came to her tiny house. Mrs P had always been afraid of disappointing, and that fear easily turned into a need to control, to over-perform, to make you eat things you didn’t want to eat, to wash and clean things that didn’t need washing and cleaning, something my sister had no doubt found oppressive at times when she had urgently needed Mrs P’s help but not her smothering anxiousness. And in fact, however patronising my sister’s words might have seemed to me, I noticed that Mrs P’s face did actually smooth out as she spoke, as though in her sleep – if it was sleep rather than simply exhaustion – she were taking comfort from her daughter’s reminding her that God has everything under control, however much, to others of us, it may seem that nothing is ever really under control and that life, even when boring, is unspeakably precarious.
It was 3.30 or thereabouts and thus began Mrs P’s last twenty-four hours, since she would expire – the word is appropriate – at 3.20 the following day, at exactly the moment I would need to leave her bedside to catch my bus to the airport, as if in her determination never to be the slightest bother to anyone Mrs P had been willing herself to depart in time for me to watch her go and still arrive punctually at Heathrow for my rather shorter journey, perhaps not appreciating that, having watched a parent die, it would not be easy even for a faithless son to grab his bag and head for the airport.
In any event, the time for private exchanges was now definitely behind us. Already the visitors were flowing thick and fast. First my uncle came, Mrs P’s younger brother who had recently lost his wife, followed a few minutes later by his son, my cousin, who had returned to London from Cork to be beside his father in the difficult aftermath of his bereavement, only to find him facing a second bereavement. And indeed the poor man looked needier even than his sister, certainly more troubled, sitting heavily by the bed, wringing his heavy old hands. Now my brother-in-law arrived, my sister’s husband, and explained that first he had had trouble finding a parking space for the van, then had had to walk the dogs they had brought with them, since the animals couldn’t be left behind with the woman who was looking after their daughter, their seriously disabled daughter, and he fired up his iPad and began to show us photographs of these dogs – a handsome Irish Setter and a white Pomeranian – and when Mrs P could not raise her head to look at his iPad he told her with no change in his cheerful tone of voice that he could already see her dancing down the golden streets of paradise with the Reverend P, my father, deceased thirty-two years before. But my sister, I noticed, was more careful with the evangelical talk in the presence of my uncle and cousin. My uncle and his son, my cousin that is, I realised, were to be spared the religious rhetoric. They were not part of the inner circle. Then two nurses came for the bedpan and a change of sheets and we visitors were invited to retire and make ourselves instant coffee in the guest lounge.
So it went on for the entire afternoon and early evening – long watches beside the bed interspersed with breaks drinking coffee in the lounge – until another nurse came into the room and said she had my brother on the phone and did Mrs P wish to take the call? Then Mrs P, whom I sometimes suspected was merely lying low so she would not have to waste energy discussing dogs and iPads, immediately perked up and said yes, yes, she would take it, and when, a few moments later, the phone on the bedside table rang, she actually raised herself, albeit with some effort, on to an elbow, reached out a shaking hand, lifted the receiver and brought it back to her large ear, as if she were her old self again; and even when she called my brother by the wrong name – by her brother’s name, that is – none of us considered this a sign of dementia since Mrs P had always mixed up the names of those she loved, though for all other names, and especially for biblical verses, she had a memory second to none.
‘Not very well,’ Mrs P confessed to this son whose soul she had given up for lost.
‘Oh, very comfortable, thanks,’ she told the man who always beat her at Scrabble.
‘Yes, I know it’s a long way to come,’ she agreed. ‘Yes, of course, I understand, my dear, and at such short notice … No,’ she said. ‘I can imagine. Don’t you worry, love. I’m being well looked after.’
She put the phone down, and perhaps twenty minutes later the vomiting began.
So – and this I hadn’t foreseen – there was to be one last serious exchange between myself and Mrs P and a last decision for me to take that had intimately to do with our relationship. She had vomited three or four basins of black blood – curious disposable basins, made of that rough compressed cardboard they once used for egg boxes – then fallen into a deep sleep. Given this deterioration, I had decided to stay the night in the hospice rather than with my uncle. There was a well-upholstered recliner in the room. The head nurse seemed rather pleased about this, since it meant somebody would be constantly at hand if Mrs P had another crisis. And so it was. Shortly before midnight she had asked for water. I had given her the plastic cup with the easy-drinking lid, a cup in every way like those I had given my children in their playpens. However, when she tried to swallow, a river of black blood frothed out.
I had not expected to have to show practical skills; all the same, grabbing basins and calling nurses was rather easier than being challenged on one’s faith. ‘I want to go tonight,’ Mrs P cried as the two young women cleaned her up. ‘Dear Jesus take me tonight.’ The nurses asked me to step into the corridor for five minutes while they changed her soaking sheets, and when I returned and again sat beside her and took her hands and called her Mum, she looked perplexed.
‘I thought you had gone to the hotel, dear.’
‘No, I’m staying.’
She didn’t understand.
‘I’ll sleep on the chair.’
‘Well, goodnight,’ she said. ‘I hope it’s a nice hotel.’ Then she muttered, ‘I’m not worried about you splitting with Mary, Thomas. I’m worried about you dithering.’
The nurse came in to check her blood pressure. While the pad was pumping up, Mrs P said. ‘My son is just going to his hotel. Goodnight, Thomas.’
The nurse raised an eyebrow in my direction.
‘I’m staying with you, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’m staying here. In case you’re sick again.’
Then at last she understood and a look almost of panic tensed her drugged lips and cheeks.
‘I don’t want you to see me like this, Thomas.’
I was holding one hand while the nurse pumped the blood pressure pad around the other wrist.
‘But I don’t mind, Mum. I’m glad to help.’
‘I don’t want you to see,’ she repeated.
In the corridor I spoke to the nurse, the head nurse. They could prepare me a bed in a guest room, she told me. Obviously they would fetch me at once if there were ‘developments’. Or I could lie on the recliner. Mrs P was sleeping again. They had adjusted her medication in response to the new situation. She would probably not even be aware I was there. On the other hand, she had expressed a very clear preference.
I sat in the guest lounge and drank coffee, watched some football highlights. Why did I want to stay in my mother’s room? Did I think I could help her, protect her, reassure her? Did I want to be a hero, want to tell people I had spent the night beside her, the night she died? She is not reassured by your presence, I told myself. On the contrary, she is perturbed to think that her son, her younger son, is seeing her in this state. Mrs P wants you to find faith and love for Jesus, she wants you to be decisive about your marriage, but she does not want you to show your love for her in this way. Perhaps she was afraid as much of what I might hear as see: some outcry perhaps, some doubt, some moment when faith seemed weak and victory lost. She wanted to protect me from that, protect me for one last night from death. All at once it was easy to see that I must respect her wish. I must protect her from realising she had lost her protecting role towards me.
I slept soundly in the guest room. Mrs P had three more bouts of vomiting during the night. She had been lucid then, the nurses told me, and calm, but when I went to her around eight she was not speaking and would not speak again; there was a slight squeeze of the hand, perhaps, before ten o’clock, the trace of a smile, maybe, until midday, after which it was left for those friends and family members who came to stand and sit in silence, waiting and watching and listening and wondering whether each quavering breath would be the last until, at last, around 3.20, it was. Half a dozen of us were present, holding our breath to hear if Mrs P was merely holding hers. But when we breathed again, she did not. I had her hand in mine and after some minutes, leaning my head on the bed rail, my eyes, though full of tears, finally focused on the notice on the opposite wall:
Visitors are warned that all doors, including patio doors, will be closed and locked before 10 p.m. in order that the security alarm system can be turned on for the night.
I looked at my watch. That moment was six and a half hours away. It would come. There was no need for faith.