His mother had to stay in hospital for another month. She was moved twice in the next four weeks, once to a post-operative ward, where everyone had undergone head injuries or brain surgery and then to a rehabilitation unit. She had suffered a brain-stem injury through whiplash and, with it, a debilitating stroke. Her speech was slow and often slurred. Her right side was not quite paralysed but severely impaired, so that she had difficulty walking and grasping, though the nurses assured them all that most of these effects would pass with daily exercise and regular visits to a rehabilitation or physiotherapy centre. More disturbing was that her powers of reasoning were damaged. She regularly came out with the wrong words for things, just like Granny, and when she picked up a biro and tried to write a postcard, her writing was that of an infant, broad and uncontrolled.
She knew who they all were, though she sometimes stumbled saying Eustace and took to calling him angel, which might have been heartwarming were it not so entirely unlike her old self. She had become tactile in a way she never used to be, either. The old her had been controlled, even niggardly in her expressions of affection, but the returned her, as Eustace found he was thinking of her, was a toucher of cheeks and holder of hands. He might have welcomed this had it been more discriminating, had he felt occasionally singled out, but he soon saw that she called doctors angel as well, and touched the nurses’ cheeks with the same childlike wonder with which she touched his.
He tried in vain now to make his father visit. He lied. ‘She’s asking for you,’ he said. ‘She keeps asking where you are.’
But his father closed down at any mention of her or shrugged or left the room on some mumbled pretext. Thinking of the letter he had uncovered, Eustace could only imagine that his father had received something similar and was upset and angry and needed to punish her by withholding himself. Certainly Mrs Fowler made no attempt to urge him to go and just shook her head and wiped bleachy cloths over surfaces. Eustace could understand his father’s anger and withdrawal. His pleasure at his mother’s stumbling return to a kind of normality was tempered with the knowledge that she had reached the point of leaving them both for ever and with gladness.
He mentioned his father to her whenever he could, continued to lie to her as well about how often he spoke of her and how much he wanted her home.
‘He doesn’t visit because he hates hospitals,’ he told her. ‘And because he’s so sad. He’s very sad all the time.’
But she just said things like, ‘Poor man. Poor, poor man.’ And sometimes she cried a little, as though his father were a wounded pet or dying bird whose suffering she was powerless to assuage. Just once, when she was on the rehabilitation ward and he was keeping her company on one of the shuffling walks she was now encouraged to make the length of a long corridor supported on two sticks, he ambushed her. He had the change ready in his pocket and as they slowly approached an unoccupied telephone booth, he darted from her side, rang home and stuffed in coins when Mrs Fowler answered.
‘I’ve got Mother here,’ he told her. ‘Dad said I should get her to ring him.’
And while she duly hurried to bring his father to speak, he held out the receiver to his mother. ‘Dad’s coming to the phone for you.’ She took the receiver carefully with both hands, still not trusting her right one to work on its own, and held it to her ear, long fingers splayed out along it in a way that would have looked elegant had it not been strange.
‘Hello?’ she said uncertainly. ‘Hello?’ Then she looked confused and terribly sad and held the receiver out to him again. ‘No one there,’ she said and he could hear the deep purr of the dialling tone that meant his father had hung up.
The longer his father held himself apart, the more Jesus and his handsome friend Father Tony were filling the vacancy he left. The priest visited every day. He quickly intuited that his presence made her son uncomfortable and would take his leave of her soon after Eustace’s arrival at her bedside, touching his shoulder with a big, muscular hand the way he always did and saying,
‘I’ll let you have Mum to yourself.’
But still Eustace was aware of the territory Tony and Jesus were stealthily annexing in her heart. He often watched from the far end of the ward and saw their heads bowed together in oddly intimate prayer or in confidential conversation. He saw how Father Tony’s manner began subtly to alter around her, the way an interloping friend’s did when increased confidences and shared private knowledge let them assume new assurance in a circle of old intimates.
The old her had never been what one would call religious, merely ticking Church of England on forms and knowing how to behave when attending Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve or Communion on Easter Sunday. She expected Eustace to be confirmed at twelve with his classmates, simply as the preparation for becoming an adult and passing for normal, as she often used to put it, but she always approached religion as she approached politics, wearing her irony like a pair of irreproachable Sunday gloves. But now she routinely had a bible on her bedside and took to devouring other books people mysteriously brought her, books with rainbows or clouds on the covers and with heart-on-sleeve titles like Summoned By Grace or Christ the True Friend . And she began to be visited not only by Father Tony but by two or three women who had not been her friends before. They were her age or older and had in common a fondness for folksy, homespun clothes, a lack of make-up and a very slightly reserved, even assessing manner towards Eustace, as though waiting for him to leave so they could return to less guarded conversation with his mother. She had never had much in the way of friends before, which was why her friendship with Carla had been so transformative. He quite liked Barbara, the tall, bony-faced one closest to her in age, because she laughed at things and didn’t refer to Jesus as though he were a friend who happened not to be present.
The increasing presence of these new confidantes at her bedside, with their little posies of wild flowers, plastic bags of home-baked flapjacks or mottled windfall apples, made it all the stranger that he never saw Carla there, especially given how kindly Carla had asked after her when he ran into her downstairs that time. He made a point of ringing her, although they had agreed not to arrange a resumption of cello lessons until after half-term. He reached her answering machine, a device that few people had and which made him shy so he hung up and wrote a little message down on the telephone pad as he always did, then rang her back to leave it in as lifelike a manner as he could muster.
‘Mother’s much better,’ he told her. ‘She’s had a sort of stroke but she’s walking and talking and I know she’d love to see you, if you were passing.’
He was inexperienced at the dynamics of friendship but he was observant and had seen the way people at school protected their pride after an argument by drawing stand-in, second-best friends to them while the principal friendship recovered or died. He felt sure that, once Carla swept up to his mother’s bedside with her bouncing hair and long limbs and beautiful clothes, the proper order would be restored and these new women and Father Tony and Jesus, especially Jesus in fact, would slip back to their proper places on the margins of her life.
He imagined Carla encouraging his mother to make a virtue of her new short hair with a good salon cut and some hoop earrings to show off her exposed neck and ears.
Carla didn’t call him back – he hadn’t suggested she should and had been quite clear that his mother was still in the hospital, on Carla’s doorstep, in fact – but he left it a few days until, sitting with his mother and Father Tony in the rehabilitation ward’s day room, he said, as cheerfully and as naturally as he could, ‘So has Carla been to see you yet? I ran into her and Louis the other day and she asked how you were doing and I told her she could find you here.’
Father Tony cleared his throat, as though to cover a rogue fart, and his mother looked Eustace in the eye and said, ‘I can appreciate how much she has done for you, darling, but Carla Gold is no longer my friend.’
‘But—’ he started.
Only Father Tony touched him on the shoulder and said, ‘Eustace? I think we have to accept that your mother knows her own mind.’
They were distracted just then by the arrival of the tea trolley and the conversation was swiftly swung around to focus on Eustace and how he was doing at his new school, but he realized afterwards that it was the first time the priest had been there when he arrived and still there when he left.
The head of rehabilitation had made it clear that his mother would be ready to leave hospital at the end of that week, on the understanding that arrangements would be made for her to attend regular physiotherapy sessions to improve her motor control and continue to see a therapist to restore her speech. They had warned her that some of her brain damage would be permanent and that she could not expect to recover all her lost faculties. When she was tired, her symptoms were likely to become worse.
Eustace and Mrs Fowler had been preparing for her return. A second, sturdier hand rail had been fixed on the stairs up to their private part of the house and grab rails fixed beside the bath and lavatory so that, short of the installation of panic bells and a commode, there was not much left to distinguish the elderly guests’ territory from his mother’s.
But on the Friday when he returned from school expecting to find that a hospital car or ambulance had dropped his mother off, Mrs Fowler told him a very nice, tall woman he guessed was Barbara, had called round instead to help pack a suitcase of clothes for his mother to wear during a recuperative stay at a Christian community some way inland. Mrs Fowler seemed to think this perfectly understandable and possibly was slightly relieved at not suddenly having to take on the care of her employer’s wife as well as the management of the home.
They did not even have an address or a name for where she had gone until the first of her postcards arrived for him after that weekend. It was a beautiful old manor house with orchards and a vegetable garden. Whatever its old name, the Christian community who owned and ran it called it Grace Manor.
The food is all vegetarian and very healthy, she wrote in her new childish handwriting. Lots of pulses! And we all help cook and clean. I’m a bit clumsy at dusting. But it’s so very special. Father Tony calls by most days.
Eustace was cross with her at first for going there without warning so he didn’t write back until her second postcard – a view of the gatehouse – and then did so carefully without a hint of surprise or disapproval at her defection. He showed her postcards to his father, who read them without comment and passed them back.