His mother didn’t die. The nurses kept saying she was a fighter, though Eustace failed to see how they could know this when she simply lay there and breathed. He visited every day. It was the nearest he ever came to religious observance. Every afternoon he caught the train and a bus to the hospital to sit by her bed and watch her for a while. He managed to persuade his father to come as well and drive him just twice, but the one great dramatic act of driving overnight to Scotland to fetch him seemed to have sapped his father’s reserves of energy and altruism. He was sliding deeper and deeper into a near-wordless passivity; cared for by Mrs Fowler and the staff in the home, he had effectively become a resident.
It emerged that Mrs Fowler was a formidable organizer. Sighing that his father could not be expected to continue under the circumstances with all he usually did , she discreetly assumed the reins of the house, receiving deliveries of all the goods he used to drive to fetch and occasionally asking Eustace to play the man by changing a lightbulb or putting out the rubbish, even though he suspected she only left such tasks undone to humour him.
So he got into the habit of visiting his mother alone, taking the train to Bristol then the bus to the hospital, and asking his father for the money to do so. The nurses began to greet him like an old friend and he soon knew his path through the hospital without needing to consult the coloured signs.
‘Talk to her,’ they said. ‘Let her know you’re there!’
And he did try, but he had never been an especially chatty boy and it felt artificial to become one now. He did touch the back of her hand however, and allowed himself to kiss her cheek and would simply say, ‘Hello again. It’s only me,’ assuming that was enough and that she could recognize his voice.
The car was a write-off, apparently, so badly damaged the insurers said it was a miracle anyone had survived. If this could be called surviving. His father and Mrs Fowler took delivery of a brand-new version of the destroyed one. It sat gleaming and unused in the drive like a boldly stated lie asserting that nothing had changed.
As his father took to sitting in the day room with the guests, occasionally playing silent games of patience, Granny began to talk loudly to him about that woman and Eustace, listening patiently to her, realized she had never liked his mother, not even slightly.
‘He should never have married that woman,’ she told him. ‘I knew she’d be trouble. A restless soul. Like trying to hold a cat when it doesn’t want to be held.’ And she mimed scratching his face.
He didn’t pay this much attention as she was clearly beginning to go a bit peculiar, sometimes spending hours at a time flicking through her bible in search of a verse she could never find apparently, sometimes giving no sign of recognition for a few minutes after he entered her room.
‘You’ve grown so,’ she would say by way of apology, as though he was deliberately disguising himself.
He had not seen Vernon since their last meeting before he went to Scotland and Vernon’s awkward departure had left behind it a worry about how the friendship would resume. Starting at Broadelm Comprehensive in September, their routines would be utterly disrupted and he feared Vernon would make new friends and leave him behind as a reminder of activities he would rather forget.
So he was touched when Vernon showed up at the front door with a bunch of flowers one morning and said, ‘I’m sorry about your mother. Could I visit her with you?’
For a silly moment, glancing through the front door window, Eustace had thought the flowers were for him, but he was still touched. The train ride into Bristol and the short bus journey gave them a chance to recover lost ground. He answered all Vernon’s questions, told him all about Ancrum and Jean Curwen. Or nearly all. He found he preferred not to tell him about Turlough.
‘How did you hear about my mother?’ he asked.
‘Oh . . .’ Vernon thought a moment, head slightly on one side in the attitude he sometimes adopted of a much older person. ‘Let me think. Of course, it was Mrs Cobb. She cleans for us as well. Twice a week.’
Eustace was briefly bemused by this rare glimpse into Vernon’s home life. He pictured Vernon and his father solemnly lifting their slippered feet as Mrs Cobb ran the Hoover beneath them, whistling tunelessly between her teeth. Mrs Cobb also cleaned at the hotel that catered exclusively to the blind. She said it had left her always meticulous about replacing things in exactly the same positions after she had dusted, though she knew her predecessor at the place had taken to moving furniture around out of malice.
Vernon surprised Eustace afresh when they reached the intensive care unit. He greeted Eustace’s mother with something approaching tenderness, touching the back of her hands, as Eustace always did, and holding his flowers beneath her nose for a few seconds so that she might breathe in their scent. Scents, he assured Eustace, especially of herbs and flowers, were tremendously stimulating to the brain.
‘Just think how readily you wake at the smell of toast,’ he reminded him.
There was no change in his mother that day, but Eustace liked the thought that the scent of his friend’s flowers might be stirring her steadily as she slept on.
Feeling their friendship had just reached another level, he dared to be bold as they walked back to Temple Meads from the bus stop.
‘Tell me about your mother,’ he said. ‘You never mention her.’
‘Because she died when I was very little,’ Vernon said. ‘People feel awkward when I mention her, so I tend not to.’ In the thoughtful silence that followed this, Eustace felt Vernon draw his cloak of tweedy privacy back about himself.
On his way in one day, just after term had started, he met Carla Gold. It was unmistakably her, even from behind. She managed to look as though she had stepped briefly down from another, more stylish world but now was taking her gracious leave from this place where people waddled around in sports clothes or ugly uniforms. He even caught a faint whiff of her spicy scent as he walked over from the doors. She was standing with an overnight bag by her side, leaning on a crutch and, to his horror, with her right arm in a sling. She was waiting for someone.
She was equally startled to see him and he was moved that she evidently knew all about everything from the way she cried out his name and hugged him, rocking him slightly.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘So sorry. It was all so . . . And you had to cut short your course?’
‘Only by a day. Your leg,’ he said, ‘and . . .’ He gestured at her sling.
‘Oh,’ she glanced down. ‘I managed to break both my hip and my arm. Actually the arm was just a simple fracture, thank heavens, and it’s all fixed now and I can go home and lie on my own bed. It could have been so much worse . . . How is she?’
‘No change,’ he said. And her kindness and beautiful searching gaze made him melt inside in a way he simply couldn’t deal with just then, so he coughed. ‘Jean is everything you said she was.’
‘She is, isn’t she? You loved it?’
‘I really want to go back. She said if I go back at Easter, she’ll consider taking me full time.’
‘No! Really? That’s incredible!’ She was overdoing her reactions somehow, which was odd. ‘How’s the new school?’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It’s not so bad. But I’d like to start lessons again. Maybe . . .’ He glanced down at her crutch.
‘Oh. Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course. And we must. Everything’s a bit chaotic just now but, look, ring me at half-term. Maybe just after? And we can sort something out. If your father’s, well . . . Oh. Here’s Louis to fetch me. He had to leave the car miles away, I think.’
Eustace carried her case through the doors for her to where Louis was getting out of the car. Louis gave him a gratifying bear hug and ruffled his hair as though he were a child, but because it was him, Eustace didn’t mind.
‘Can we give you a lift to the station?’ Louis asked.
‘Oh. No. It’s fine. I’m on my way in actually,’ Eustace said and watched them drive off.
One day a priest was at his mother’s bedside when he got to the hospital. Eustace stared at him from the far side of the room. He was strikingly handsome, with silver hair cut so short it was tempting to reach out and feel the buzz of it against his palm. He looked like a cross between Steve McQueen and Peter Graves, who played the silver-haired character in Mission Impossible . Or like some smooth hitman in a Hitchcock film. Vicars had no business being handsome, Granny said; it gave them an unfair advantage. They were supposed to look like Dick Emery or the owlish one in Dad’s Army . Something made this priest turn on his chair, so he saw Eustace and jumped up.
‘You must be the son,’ he said and held out his hand. ‘I’m the father. Haha.’
Eustace came forward, reached out his hand and was disconcerted that the priest didn’t simply shake it but clapped his other one on the back of it, making a sort of hand sandwich. His eyes were the blue of a hot sky, made all the more intense by his silver hair and early autumn tan. ‘I’m Father Tony,’ he said.
‘I’m Eustace,’ Eustace told him. ‘Are you the hospital chaplain? Is she dying now?’
‘I’m sure she isn’t.’
He steered Eustace towards his mother’s bed, where Eustace carefully placed a chair on the opposite side to Father Tony’s. Quickly, with a touch of possessiveness, he touched the warm back of his mother’s right hand and kissed her cheek, whispering,
‘Hello. It’s only me.’
‘I don’t work here,’ Father Tony went on. ‘I was just visiting a couple of friends who are in for operations. A friend who’s a nurse here always tells me if there’s someone who she thinks needs me or . . . who isn’t being visited much.’
Eustace noted the waxy ridge on his mother’s ring finger where the nurses had taken off her wedding ring for his father to keep safely at home along with Grandpa’s special watch. It was a small reminder that hospitals were public places, almost the street, given the freedom with which complete strangers could come to one’s bedside.
‘I visit her every day,’ Eustace told him quietly.
‘It can’t be easy for your father,’ Father Tony said. ‘I heard a little about—’
‘He manages. We have help.’
‘I should leave you in peace.’
‘Thank you.’
Eustace wanted to demur. He was not a Christian, not really, but neither was he bold or interested enough to be a professed atheist. He did feel, however, that prayer should be a silent, private activity. But Father Tony prayed anyway, loud enough for the nurses to hear, certainly loud enough for his mother to hear, and he used her first name, as though he knew her. It seemed to go on and on. It was deeply embarrassing, like spontaneously singing in a public place, and Eustace focused closely on his mother’s hand and the nearby laundry label on a hospital sheet until Father Tony was done. He was quite proud of himself for resisting the impulse to say ‘Amen’ at the end.
Father Tony finally stood up to go, coming round to lay a hand on Eustace’s shoulder as he did so.
‘Good boy, Eustace,’ he said. ‘God sees you.’
Then he padded away. He wore Hush Puppies. Granny would have hated him on sight. Unlike her daughter-in-law, she was impervious to charm and impressed only by principles.
‘It’s all right,’ he told his mother. ‘He’s gone now. That was awful!’ Then he continued his visit in his usual companionable silence. When he reached home that evening, he reported to his father as always, if only to say that there was no change, but he said nothing of the priest. He didn’t like to risk passing on Father Tony’s implied criticism of his father’s not visiting.
He had assumed it was a one-off thing, a chance meeting in a huge building where strangers came and went all the time. The next time he visited, however, Father Tony was there again, almost as though timing his arrival to coincide with Eustace’s. Eustace stopped far short, before the priest could spot him, and went instead to fetch a cup of strong tea and a soothingly bland iced bun from the canteen. He dawdled, making himself read a chapter from a geometry schoolbook before he returned, to give Father Tony time to leave.
When he touched his mother’s hand to greet her, he found the priest had tucked a simple wooden crucifix under it. He could see that this was meant in kindness but he was disturbed at how it emphasized her lack of choice in the matter. A doll, a book, a bar of chocolate, a bottle of beer, all could equally have been placed in such a way and each would equally have implied a choice she hadn’t made. Eustace pocketed the crucifix and, when he left, slipped into the hospital chapel, which lay on his route back to the bus stop. He left the ugly thing on a seat in there, where someone might pick it up, out of choice.
He caught a slightly later train and bus the next day and there was no sign of the priest. There was, however, a bouquet of very beautiful white flowers with a card propped up against it, which said, We’re all thinking of you. X .
‘There are some lovely flowers,’ he told his mother. ‘From people who are thinking of you and send a kiss. The picture is of . . .’ He turned the card over. ‘Oh. That’s nice. It’s a view of the suspension bridge.’
Because Vernon’s flowers were still looking good and the new bunch was still wrapped he decided to take it home in an effort to cheer his father. When he arrived he found a vase, filled it with water and arranged the flowers as best he could before setting them on a table in the sitting room window. They looked lovely and smelled even better than Vernon’s had. The houses in the magazines always had flower arrangements. He had looked at the gorgeous bucketfuls outside florists and been astonished at how much people were prepared to pay for such a fleeting pleasure. He imagined a future in which he regularly bought himself flowers with no thought of the cost.
‘Look,’ he told his father when he came in. ‘She already had Vernon’s by the bed so I brought these home for you.’
His father didn’t exclaim over their beauty or scent but merely asked whom they were from.
‘I don’t know,’ Eustace told him. ‘The card doesn’t give much away.’
‘Let me see.’
He took the little card from Eustace.
‘I don’t recognize the handwriting,’ Eustace said. ‘Do you?’
But his father only read the card with a frown, tossed it into the wastepaper basket and drifted from the room without further comment. It was unlike him to be so graceless. The next morning the beautiful flowers had vanished. Eustace spotted them later in the day room, where they were already wilting in the heat.
That night there was a letter waiting for him at home, from Naomi. Her handwriting was very young for her age and he remembered how she almost boasted of neglecting all her schooling for the cello. It was a funny letter, full of silly jokes and catchphrases from their short week together. Did you do D minor? it began. Well, did you?
She had discovered the Italians made nicknames by shortening from the front.
So you can be Ace or Azio and I can be Omi, which is easier to spell than Na, which would need a Y not to be pronounced Nah.
She gave a full account of the last night’s concert and gratifyingly added that Jean had explained that she was taking the place of a fine young player we hope to have back with us as a permanent student before too long . So get you, Maestro.
After supper he felt he must write her a letter in reply. He had no paper and envelopes so went to his mother’s little desk. There, sure enough, he found a pad of the Basildon Bond she liked – the smaller one because it meant short letters could be made to look longer. She was not one of Nature’s letter-writers, tending to resort to paper only when she needed to say thank you to people for presents or hospitality, neither of which happened very often. And she had recently abandoned her proper fountain pen for a Parker biro his father had given her for a birthday present. It was very smart, made of shiny metal Eustace liked to think was silver but which was probably just stainless steel. It wrote far better than the leaky plastic ones he tended to use at school, which had a way of unpredictably releasing blotches of sticky ink, which his hand then smeared across the exercise books as he wrote. So he picked up her Parker biro now, thinking to use it for a more impressive effect in his letter to Naomi.
One old-fashioned concession his mother maintained was a heavy address embosser. It had belonged to Granny – it belonged to the house really – and as a small boy he had been allowed to use it for his mother on the rare occasions when she had a letter to send. You tucked the paper carefully into a slot, pulled down a handle that was decorated a bit like her old manual sewing machine, and there, very chastely, was a colourless imprint of their address and telephone number. Only the machine was so old that the number was now too short and his mother had to spoil the elegant effect by writing in the extra digits when it was a letter to someone who needed to know them.
He tore off the top sheet in the pad, slid it in and pressed, admiring, as always, the neatness of the imprint produced and lamenting in advance that the messiness of his handwriting could never match it. He picked up his mother’s biro but had written no more than the date and Dear when he saw quite clearly the ghostly imprint of his own name where he was about to write Naomi’s. There were more words. A whole letter in fact.
He turned on the desk light in an effort to read it better but his mother’s incisive, rounded script looked like so many Os and Ys. He could make out the greedily scooping loops on her Gs, which Vernon had once told him were an indicator of need for pleasure and depth of sexual desire .
All the pencils in her pen pot were HBs, so much too hard, but he remembered she had sticks of charcoal somewhere from a short-lived attendance at art classes. He opened a few little drawers, having broken off to intercept and redirect huge Mrs Knapton, who had lost her way yet again, and drifted up the wrong stairs into the private area. He held the charcoal stick flat against the writing pad and gently swept it from side to side until his mother’s handwriting stood out white against the surrounding grey.
Eustace . (He took the Dear as read.) By the time you come back from your course, I will have left to begin a new life where I doubt very much your father will want you to join me. It is nothing you or he have done wrong. I am simply in love, deeply in love, in a happy way I realized I had never been before. And once you love someone, it is hard to unlove them. I love you. I am proud of you. You will do very well without me. Mother X
He read it twice to be absolutely certain of its sense then used her good paper scissors to cut the letter into the smallest pieces he could manage. Then he crumpled them into his pocket so that he could drop them safely in a public litter bin next time he went out. But where was the original? He went to search his room carefully, looking in all the places she might have left a letter she wanted only him to find but there was no trace of it. Perhaps she had posted it and it was somehow delayed, but that was hard to credit, even with strikes and so on. Perhaps she had changed her mind and destroyed the original, as he had just destroyed its ghost? More disturbing, of course, was that his father might have intercepted it and been worrying how to break the news to him less abruptly.
Mrs Fowler summoned them to eat their supper shortly afterwards. They ate together in strenuously polite near-silence. Eustace realized it was completely out of the question either to tell his father what he had just discovered or to ask him even indirect questions about where his mother had been going when she had the accident.
He wrote the letter to Naomi after supper. He kept his tone light, said only that his mother was still in hospital and that he hoped to begin cello lessons again soon but that Carla Gold was out of action for a bit. He signed himself Azio because Ace looks like bragging.
He thought back repeatedly through the rest of the evening, while companionably watching television with his father and lying awake until sleep claimed him, and over and over again through his classes the next day, thought of her increasing absences and naked cheerfulness in recent months. And he saw that she was right: even had he not been so distracted by his music or by Vernon or whatever, there was nothing that could have been done, short of his father imprisoning her. Love had infected her as inevitably as any virus. He could no more have stopped her falling in love than he could have prevented her accident. This did not diminish a creeping feeling of desolation; whatever the fragility of her bond with his father, her maternal love had not been strong enough to hold her to them. Neither did it stop him idly speculating on what the man was like who had so inflamed her or feeling a curious envy of the passion she had tasted, poisonous fruit so seductive it had made her prepared to abandon them all, assuming their disgusted rejection of her in turn.
And, of course, she had left them nonetheless, vanishing into her medically managed unconsciousness as completely as she had planned to do into her mysterious lover’s house.
For two days he could not bear to visit her, although he loitered in the public library after school to let his father assume he had been to the hospital rather than risk raising the question of why he suddenly hadn’t gone. When guilt, love and curiosity overcame him on the third day and he returned, two things struck him as he entered the intensive care unit. Father Tony was there again, at her bedside, holding her hand, and her eyes were open, looking directly at Eustace as he approached.
The uncomplicated joy that burst up in him on seeing her restored to life made him break down in tears for the first time since early childhood. As he approached the bed, his knees buckled, and he found himself gasping and sobbing into her blanketed lap like a five-year-old. He felt her hand spasmodically grasping the back of his head and heard her voice, croaky from dehydration and underuse, saying hush , and there, there and Eustace .
And the priest, alarmed perhaps at this unexpected upwelling of raw emotion, was saying, ‘It’s perfectly natural. It’s to be expected.’ And also, ‘Thank you, Lord Jesus!’
At last embarrassment overcame relief and Eustace composed himself sufficiently to sit up and look at her. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I . . . I thought you were dying.’
‘Blow your nose,’ she said wearily and slowly nudged the tissue box towards him.
She looked at once herself and much older, and slightly mad with her tufty hair. And her face had lost its symmetry; one side hung back from expression now, like the other half’s shyly reluctant twin. Perhaps it was just the trauma or residual sleepiness at work, but her voice appeared to have lost entirely the edge of irony that since childhood had made him brace himself slightly for each encounter with her, just as adults and painful experience taught one always to handle knives with care.
‘I did die,’ she told him slowly and there were tears in her eyes suddenly. ‘I left my body. I was up there in the corner of the room and it felt so good to be free! No more aches and pains. No more body. And I looked down and saw you at the bedside.’
‘Who? Me?’ Eustace asked. Had he stopped her dying?
‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘Him.’ And she gave Father Tony a mad, lopsided smile as though she had known and loved him all her life. ‘I saw light. A long, long tunnel with light at the end, where I longed to be, but there was a voice saying: Not yet. Go back . And then I was back and I heard him praying. Who are you again?’
‘I’m Father Tony.’ The priest seemed to grow an inch. ‘Shall we all pray?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh yes.’
‘I’ll phone home,’ Eustace said and hurried out to the payphone in the hall, passing two nurses and a doctor who were running towards the intensive care unit, alerted to the drama playing out in there.
Mrs Fowler answered and cried when he told her, which made him nearly cry again and realize she had been cooking in the house for his entire life.
The pips went before she could fetch his father.