My mother is coming to visit.
The first sign is the sound of a taxi drawing up. Then there is a banging of car doors, a rustle of bags and a loud cheerful voice in the street outside.
There is more banging and stomping as she unlocks the front door and comes inside.
“Hello-o?” she calls. “Now stay in the black, don’t get overexposed.”
I come downstairs. In the hall, my mother is divesting herself of a black metallic walking stick, a backpack, a shoulder bag, a carrier bag, a purple coat and a turquoise hat and scarf.
“I’ve brought various things,” she says, delving into her bags. “I went into Sainsbury’s opposite the station and bought you some yellow chrysanthemums. You ought to be able to see those in the gloom.” She comes into the living room and gives a yell as she walks into the coffee table. (In the dim light, visitors entering from the bright world outside go temporarily blind.)
“I’ll just stand here and give my eyes time to adjust,” my mother says, handing me a lumpy package. She has brought some raw beets, which she is going to make into borscht for lunch. (Raw beets, strangely, are a metropolitan luxury, very difficult to get hold of in my part of Hampshire.) She has also brought a new mug with a nice strawberry pattern, and some posh jam as a present for Pete, who is a connoisseur of conserves.
My mother sits on the tall chair in the kitchen, chopping up beetroot, while I make cups of tea. She holds forth on:
1. Something outrageous that the government is doing (her indignation is fresh, as she bought a paper to read on the train).
2. Problems she is having with the venue for the music course that she runs twice a year. Many of her punters are past their first youth, but the well-known boarding school she hires has once again assigned them rooms with bunk-beds.
3. My brother, who is too amenable, and can’t say no to anyone, which means he takes on too many musical commitments and doesn’t get enough exercise.
While the soup cooks, we go upstairs into the black to talk and play games.
After lunch my mother sits down at the piano, and the noise and movement, the bumps and crashes and exclamations, simply fall away, as if a live electric cable has, by connecting to the keyboard, earthed itself; she plays with lucid musical intelligence, serenity and joy. The music comes up through the floor of my dark room, filling it with rippling sound. With human company attached, I can listen, and not be overwhelmed.
When I was growing up, our weekly piano lesson periodically descended into sulking and rage as I tried to master some new aspect of technique. For a while, there was an enterprise known as the “Family Newspaper,” written by all family members on large blank sheets of newsprint with felt-tip pens. “Anna is still struggling with the scale of F major,” my mother reported in one of her news columns. I was indignant. An entry appeared in the next edition in irregular purple letters: “Mummy is still struggling with the Brahms—Handel variations,” it read, referring to a large and virtuoso concert piece.
In my mother I see the source of parts of myself, and also elements so alien that they leave me mystified. Yet my mother is the person to whom I say things about my situation that I say to no one else.
She tells me that another of my cousins has had a baby.
“What is that to me?” I ask. “I don’t want to know things that remind me that I am a failure.”
She tells me of an acquaintance who has been rushed to hospital, because he was coughing up blood.
“At least he can go to hospital,” I say.
My mother says she has spoken to her friend Eleanor, who has had psychiatric problems for years, and now lives alone, depressed, and hardly ever goes out.
“Can she see the sky outside her window?” I ask. “Can she open her front door and walk along her street? Can she turn on the telly whenever she wants to and watch it for as long as she likes? Then she should bow down and kiss the ground in gratitude.”
“I have tried to tell her about you,” says my mother.
I would not speak like this to Pete or to my friends, and do so to my mother only rarely. Told of others’ joys or misfortunes, I usually respond with friendly interest or appropriate concern. If there is a small dark movement of the heart, it is suppressed, and I find I soon feel, sincerely, what I am saying.
But with my mother I become a child again. “It’s not fair,” I yell, in more sophisticated language, and my desperate, incontinent jealousy floods out, hot and foul and unconstrained.
What will I do, what will I do, when the time comes, that must inevitably come, and my feisty, bustling mother is dead?