‘I’M THINKING,’ SADIE said when finally she was home again, ‘of going Youth Hostelling this weekend with Sue and Joanna. Okay?’
‘In October?’ Angela said.
‘What’s wrong with October—you said the weather was perfect when you dragged us off to Woburn—lovely healthy bracing air, you said.’
‘That was for the day—you were coming back to a warm house and bed.’
‘I’m really not worried about houses and beds.’
‘But what would you do all day—you hate walking—and what if the weather suddenly changed?’
‘Look, that’s our problem.’
‘Where would you go? You know nothing about Youth Hostelling.’
‘You don’t have to know about it to do it. We haven’t decided where to go yet.’
‘It all sounds very vague.’
‘But can I go?’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘I mean, you don’t mind? It will be one less to look after anyway, won’t it.’
‘How very thoughtful,’ Angela said.
‘But you don’t mind?’
‘Why should I?’
‘You always say that but you always sound as if you do.’
‘Well I don’t. I just haven’t the energy to sound enthusiastic. And I’m probably a bit jealous—I wish I was fifteen and going off on mad weekends instead of nearly forty and stuck at home looking after a sick mother. I expect that’s why I sound gloomy. But you know I like you to enjoy yourself.’
‘Thanks,’ Sadie said, and then, as she drifted off, ‘I just wish you would enjoy yourself too.’
Angela paused in her dreary task of sorting out the washing to go in the machine. She had wanted Mother to enjoy herself too, but she hardly ever did. Tom used to make her laugh and even got her to be silly, to fool around with them, but that was on very rare occasions and other memories of Mother in high spirits were dim and unconvincing. Mother lacked gaiety. She had no exuberance. And now Sadie thought she was in the same mould—someone apparently incapable of enjoyment. Angela shoved dirty socks and trousers into the machine, sickened by this glimpse of how her daughter saw her—and rightly. Not for months and months had she been carefree and her own laughter sounded strange to her when she heard it. It was dismal. It was an indictment of her whole way of life. Worse, really, than Mother’s melancholy had been to them because whereas Mother had been plainly sad, even if none of her children knew why, she herself was strident and bad tempered and plainly nothing except unpleasant.
‘Don’t be depressed about being depressed,’ Ben said, ‘that would be the end. What do you expect anyway—how could you be a bundle of fun at the moment? You worry about your Mother, with reason, and you worry about Sadie with less reason but still with some cause. It’s only common sense that you’re not exactly cracking a joke a minute.’
‘Sadie thinks I never enjoy myself—it isn’t just that I’m not jolly. She thinks I have no pleasures.’
‘All adolescents think that—at fifteen you can’t understand that pleasure isn’t necessarily noise and crowds and action. You can’t even imagine work could be a pleasure.’
‘I can’t see any way out. I can’t abandon Mother.’
‘You don’t have to abandon her. She’ll be better soon and then she’ll go home and you’ve more than done your bit—you can take it easy then.’
‘I already take it easy for most of the time—hardly ever going to see them—hiding behind letters and telephone calls.’
‘Most people,’ Ben said, ‘do not ring their mothers up every day, write every week and spend at least four weeks’ precious holiday with them.’
‘Most people don’t have mothers like mine.’
Sadie began having a friend to stay the night when she was very young. Because she had never in her whole childhood and adolescence been able to have a friend to stay the night Angela encouraged the habit. She realized the excitement and fun and though it quite often ended in disaster—Sadie fell out with the friend at two in the morning—she knew it was worth it. The best part was talking before they fell asleep. Sadie and the friend would drone on for hours and it amused Angela, as she put Max and Saul to bed, to hear their chatter. Often they would talk until ten or eleven when she herself was going to bed and then she had to go up and be severe. One night they were talking so loudly they did not hear her as she mounted the stairs. Angela heard the friend say, ‘Sadie, do you hate your mother?’ She paused, knowing she ought not to listen but wanting to hear the reply so desperately that she overcame her scruples. ‘Sometimes,’ Sadie said, cautiously. ‘I love my dad,’ the friend said, ‘I love him best. Do you love your dad best?’ ‘Sometimes,’ Sadie said. ‘My mother,’ the friend said, ‘is the most horrible woman in the whole wide world. She’s mean and nasty to me—she doesn’t love me at all. Does your mother love you?’ ‘I think so,’ Sadie said. ‘I wish my mother wasn’t my mother,’ the friend said. ‘I wish Susie Barker’s mother was my mother, don’t you? Don’t you wish Susie’s mother was your mother? She’s so pretty and gentle and lovely—don’t you wish she was your mother?’ There was a long pause. Angela began rationalizing Sadie’s ‘sometimes’ before it was said. ‘No,’ Sadie said, firmly, ‘no, I don’t.’ ‘Do you like your mother better than Susie’s?’ the friend said, shocked. ‘Yes,’ Sadie said, ‘I do. I like my mother better than anyone’s mother because she’s mine, isn’t she?’
Angela was so relieved and glad she crept back down the stairs without saying a word and for weeks and months afterwards that sentence of Sadie’s thrilled her and brought ridiculous tears to her eyes whenever she thought of it.
Sadie was up early. Hearing the muffled bangs so early in the morning Angela thought first of Mother and half rose with alarm thinking that Mother had fallen out of bed—until she remembered Sadie was going Youth Hostelling. She lay back down again, relishing the feeling of well-being which had come to her after an unexpectedly good night’s sleep. She had gone to bed so depressed and miserable, racked with fears for them all, her head full of absurd images in which she saw herself as a lightning conductor for all that might come to harm them and did not know how long she could go on standing tall and straight and strong. She had screwed her eyes up tight to get herself to sleep and had thought that when it came it would be full of nightmares in which her wailing children would extend their pitiful arms towards her as she sank into a deep and black grave where Mother already lay. But no. She had slept deeply, without dreams of any kind, and now in the morning half light she was able to smile at her bedtime hysteria. She put out a hand to touch Ben, still sleeping fast, and then she got up and put on her dressing-gown and left the bedroom quietly so as not to disturb him.
Down in the hall, Sadie struggled with her borrowed rucksack, desperately trying to pull the straps over the top.
‘I can’t get the fucking thing closed,’ she said.
‘Language,’ Angela said automatically, but not feeling that usual sense of impotence.
‘I’m going to be late—bloody thing,’ Sadie said, kicking the rucksack. She looked even more unkempt than was normal and the black stuff she had plastered round her eyes made them look horrific and evil.
‘Have you had anything to eat?’ Angela said, kneeling down and beginning to empty the entire rucksack in spite of Sadie’s restraining arm.
‘I don’t want anything to eat.’
‘Go and have some toast and a hot drink and I promise by the time you’re finished this will be ready.’
‘Oh god,’ Sadie said, but she went and Angela heard the kettle being put on and the clink of the stone lid as the bread bin was opened.
The child had no idea. There was not a Trewick gene in her. Out they came, the awful muddle of already soiled clothes that ought not to have been put in at all, the enormous mud-encrusted Kickers shoes that ought to have been on her feet, the jumble of maps and packets of biscuits, crushed and unappetizing before she had even set off, the waterproof anorak she had taken without Max knowing and ought to have had on the top ready for use, and a sequined waistcoat for which Angela could not account. But she would confront Sadie about nothing. Quickly, efficiently, she repacked the rucksack and had it ready and waiting when Sadie came back, still clutching a mug of tea and ramming toast into her mouth.
‘There,’ Angela said, ‘that’s better.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Have a good time. Ring if you get lost. Have you enough money?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And don’t hitchhike—not in any circumstances. Understood?’
She stood on the doorstep for a minute, watching Sadie lumber off down the street, fidgeting with the straps of the rucksack before she had gone twenty yards. It was a slightly misty autumn morning, still cold and damp at seven o’clock, but Angela could tell that by midday the sun would have broken through. She would have given anything to be going off to walk in the New Forest, though how much walking Sadie would do remained to be seen. Half way down the street, Sadie turned and waved and made a funny face and then she was gone, turning the corner to Sue’s house. Angela picked up a milk bottle that had fallen down and set it neatly with the others on the doorstep. God knew where Sadie would end up for the night since organization was another absent talent, but she had managed to refrain from cross-examining her. Sadie was on her own. She refused to agonize over her prospects the way Mother had spoiled everything by agonizing over hers. When she eventually came back she must be greeted with a smile and her bedraggled appearance must not be criticized.
Quietly, her new mood of resolution making her feel almost light-hearted, her rested body ready for another difficult day, Angela went down the passage to the little end room where Mother was and gently opened the door. A whole night was a very long time not to have looked at an invalid and slight twinges of apprehension stirred in her stomach. But Mother looked comfortable and was still asleep. Carefully, taking care not to disturb her, Angela felt the bedclothes but they were quite dry. Pulling the curtain to one side she took a good look at Mother—her colour was gone, but then she had been ill, and her expression was stone-like, as it often was, but there was no harsh breathing. In a little while, when she had savoured the peace of the early morning house a little longer, she would wake Mother up if she was still asleep and wash her and perhaps today she would be strong enough to get up for a little while and even to talk to Father, who otherwise would become impatient and suspicious.
There was time to go through the ritual of making real coffee, to grind the beans and heat the pot and warm the milk and best, most luxurious of all, to sit at the kitchen table drinking it without being either hurried or disturbed. Being alone was something she had never had enough of. She had never been alone. At training college from the beginning she had shared a flat, and then she had married Ben straight away without that intervening few years in a bedsitter so many of her contemporaries had experienced. Often, she fantasized the state of being alone and wondered what difference it would have made to her. She imagined an immaculately tidy flat and meals when she liked them and long walks at strange times. Then she thought of Valerie once saying, a hectic weekend with them behind her, ‘Really Angela, I wouldn’t have your life for anything—you haven’t a minute to call your own.’
Mother of course thought the opposite. Mother used to say repeatedly, ‘And then you’ll all grow up and go away and I’ll be on my own.’ She even said it if they were all out on a Saturday. ‘I’ve been on my own all day,’ she said pathetically. Solitude put Mother in a panic. Mother had never in her life made coffee and sat drinking it alone, daydreaming. She had snatched cups of tea between tasks that demanded her full attention and if she saw a break in the heavy routine coming up she had automatically filled it. Not to think, that was Mother’s object—only to do, and by doing exorcize that jealous devil inside her that told her life was never meant to be like this.
Sounds of the boys stirring upstairs brought Angela to her feet. What rubbish to foist such thoughts onto Mother. ‘I’m not clever,’ Mother would say, forced to comment on anything upon which she did not wish to give an opinion, ‘I’m not clever like you—it’s no good asking me what I think.’ No talk, no real talk, just a string of platitudes linked together with sighs and exclamations, but perhaps that was something to be grateful for. If Mother ever chose to unburden herself properly it might be too much to bear. Angela set out cereal bowls, put milk and marmalade on the table, and wondered if that self-consciousness between parents and grown-up children might not after all be a good thing. The inhibiting factor might be a good thing. All these years she had regretted Mother’s reticence she had perhaps been making a big mistake and ought instead to have welcomed it—perhaps reticence, on both sides, was the only thing that made the mother-daughter relationship bearable. Perhaps, now that she felt the same thing happening with Sadie even though she thought she had laid quite different foundations, perhaps she should simply let it happen and not fight it, not see it as a measure of her own failure. Perhaps she ought to recognize that a wall had gone up and instead of beating her fists against it, just lean thankfully on it. Why, after all, admire those families where mother and daughter wept openly on each other’s shoulders and bore daily witness to each other’s more personal distress?
‘You’re looking very cheerful,’ Ben said when he came down to breakfast, ‘and real coffee—this is my lucky day.’
‘And Sadie’s gone,’ Max said, ‘good riddance.’
‘How unkind,’ Angela said, ‘she doesn’t say that when you go.’
‘I never go,’ Max said.
‘Too true, too true,’ Ben said, ‘you love us too much to tear yourself away.’
‘Do you want me to go away?’
‘The odd hour of absence might not be grieved over,’ Ben said.
‘Thanks.’
‘Oh, can’t you take a joke?’ Angela said.
‘It wasn’t a very nice joke.’
‘I’m off,’ Ben said. He kissed Angela on top of her head. ‘Keep it up,’ he said, ‘there’ll be a special prize if you look the same this evening when I come home as you do this morning.’
‘I’ll try.’
She sat a little while longer chatting to the boys, listening to their plans for the day, lazily trying to analyse why there should be such a complete lack of restraint with the boys and yet not with Sadie. They did not worry her. She was confident and sure in all her dealings with them. She could show her affection easily and felt close and secure in their company. Sadie, who was shrewd and highly sensitive to atmospheres, probably saw this, but how did she interpret it? Did she see herself as different, or Angela as different to her? Or perhaps she never thought about it at all.
Angela had never met Tom’s wife—none of them had. Tom met her in Brisbane two years after he emigrated. She was called Jo-Ellen, which Mother thought outlandish. There was not much correspondence—a card at Christmas, the occasional brief, badly written letter, and a photograph of each child as it was born. Jo-Ellen had four girls in a row, exactly two years in between each. Angela, who had Sadie the same month Jo-Ellen had her second daughter, used to show Sadie the photographs of her cousins and tried to make them mean something to her. With Ben an only child, Valerie unmarried and Harry, from whom nobody ever heard, childless, Tom’s children were Sadie’s only cousins. When the last of Tom’s girls arrived Sadie was six years old. Angela opened the envelope with the Australian stamp and without thinking said, ‘Oh how awful—poor Jo-Ellen has had another girl.’ ‘Why is it awful?’ Sadie said, looking at the photograph of the anonymous baby. ‘Well, she has three already—four girls—an all-girl family without any boys.’ ‘So?’ Sadie said, eyes beady, frown ferocious. ‘It’s nice to have both,’ Angela said, beginning to be ashamed. ‘I wouldn’t like all girls or all boys.’ ‘Why does it matter?’ Sadie said, with one of those sophisticated looks for which she was already famous in the family (‘she was born old,’ Mother said). ‘It doesn’t really,’ Angela said, weakly, and then, ‘anyway, I’m glad I’ve got both.’ ‘You nearly didn’t,’ Sadie said, ‘with three boys and only one girl. You nearly had all boys.’ ‘Yes,’ Angela said, ‘Wasn’t I lucky to have you first? Daddy always said let’s have a girl first to be sure. It would have been dreadful to be a mother without a daughter.’ Sadie smiled, a small satisfied smile. Angela was relieved, but knew that if Sadie had been just a little older, she would have found her out.
‘Mother,’ Angela whispered, laying a cool hand on Mother’s even cooler arm. ‘Mother, can you hear me? I’ve brought you some tea.’ She put the rose-covered china tea cup and saucer to which Mother had taken a fancy down on the bedside table and crossed the room to open the curtains. The last leaves had fallen off the pear tree. She stood looking at it for a moment, wishing the leaves were golden and brown instead of a shrivelled, dried-out black. Pear trees were sad in autumn. Here and there underneath the tree she could see the odd wasp-eaten fruit, rotting in the soil, an ugly, slimy thing. The tree was still beautiful in spring, thick with white blossom, each flower upon it perfect in every detail, some as huge as roses, but the fruit always began to fall before it was ripe because the tree, old as the house, was stricken by some mysterious disease that made the fruit useless year after year. Ben said they ought to chop it down and plant another but she would not hear of it. The tree to her was lovely.
‘Mother,’ she said, louder, injecting a note of brisk authority into her voice, her teacher’s voice, ‘Mother, come on, wake up, you’re like Rip Van Winkle. Have this tea before it gets cold. It’s the most beautiful morning—look, slightly misty, but the sun is going to come through any minute. Sadie has gone off already—you should have seen her with that rucksack—I can’t imagine her walking more than a hundred yards from café to café.’ On and on she chattered, tidying the table with Mother’s things on it, picking out the dead flowers from the vase on the window sill, twitching the bed covers, straightening them, waiting for Mother to make some sign. She made none. Standing at the end of the bed Angela studied her. Her eyes were still closed, the eyelids heavily veined and the grey lashes at the end stubby and bedraggled. Under each of Mother’s nostrils there was a single blob of blood, thick and clotted, entirely blocking her nose. Making a small sound of annoyance at her own neglect, Angela moved to the head of the bed, handkerchief in hand, and wiped the spots of blood away. Through the thin fabric of the handkerchief they felt hard and obstinate. She wiped more firmly, stifling the repugnance that threatened to overwhelm her, and all at once a great stream of dark, thick blood poured out, soaking the handkerchief, running down into Mother’s half-open mouth, draining into it, draining ludicrously into the pink crevices where her teeth should have been and into the wrinkles round the corner of her mouth, and then like some poisonous brackish stream flowing onwards down her neck and onto the white coverlet where a stain, wide and long, spread rapidly across sheets and blankets.
Mesmerized, her own hand holding the sodden handkerchief sticky and wet, Angela watched Mother’s blood soak the bed. Nervously, knowing it was no good, she dabbed and dabbed at Mother’s nose, looking to see if the bleeding had stopped, pulling at the stained sheets to take their appalling redness away from Mother, who did not like mess. Somewhere, a long way off, she heard the boys thundering about. There was no one to whom she could shout for help even if any sound would come from her dry mouth. A memory came to her of a diagram in a first-aid book—a person with a nose bleed ought to be flat on their back, their head only slightly raised, and a cold compress should be applied to their forehead. She pulled the three pillows from behind Mother’s head one by one and let Mother fall back, and then she grabbed a towel and managed to move her shaking legs in the direction of the little downstairs bathroom where she soaked the towel in cold water and squeezed it out and returned to lie it across Mother’s head. The bleeding stopped. Cautiously, afraid to be mistaken, she began wiping the blood away with the towel, stroking Mother’s face with the thick bulky material, watching drops of water slide across the sticky surface of her skin. It had stopped. Nothing more was coming from Mother’s nose. Relieved, Angela returned to the bathroom and filled a basin with warm water and took soap and a fresh towel and went back to Mother. She began to wash her tenderly. How had Mother come to have a nose bleed? It seemed so strange, and strange that all the fuss had not wakened her. Slowly, her hands still in the basin of warm water where bubbles of soap burst on the surface, Angela felt doubt. She turned the soap over and over with her hands until the water was cloudy. She dried her hands carefully. A pulse began to throb in her head as she forced herself to lift Mother’s eyelids. A hard, dull, creamy whiteness looked back at her. Lips bitten between her teeth she slid a hand down Mother’s side. Nothing seemed to be beating. She put her ear down on Mother’s chest, suffocated by the warm sweet smell of the blood, but there was no sound. ‘Milkman!’ Max shouted in the background. She heard the clatter of milk bottles. Stiffly, holding herself very erect, she walked to the end of the hall and took her purse off the shelf. ‘Cut yourself?’ the milkman said as she handed him the money. She tried to say no, but could not manage the simple word. She smiled and shook her head. ‘Max,’ she said, ‘take these into the kitchen.’ ‘Ugh,’ Max said, ‘they’re all over blood.’ She looked at the milk bottles, bloody fingerprints smearing the glass, matching the red tinfoil top, and carried them herself into the kitchen. ‘Max,’ she said, ‘ring Dad at the office. Tell him to come home quickly.’ She was sick into the sink where cereal bowls still floated, seeping left-over porridge into the water. ‘Dad,’ she heard Max say, ‘can you come home—Mum’s sick.’
Mother had died, around five that morning they said, peacefully they said. Mother had felt nothing, no pain, no strokes, her heart had simply packed up. The doctor was matter-of-fact. To all Angela’s tearful questions he replied either with a shrug or monosyllables. He seemed to think it was very good of him to have come at all, to a dead person who was not even his patient. She did not dare blame him. He said there had been nothing the matter with Mother’s heart when he listened to it three days ago. These things happened. He left after making out a death certificate and giving them instructions about what to do with the body as if it were a fallen tree.
The body was a problem. Angela had a great dread of ever going near it again, of ever even seeing that body to which the doctor referred as though it were an inanimate object. She could not go into the room. The things that needed doing she could not do. It was Ben who went in with the doctor, Ben who later closed the curtains and found a clean nightdress and sheets for the undertaker who was soon to come. They waited two hours for the undertaker’s men to come and when they did Angela was embarrassed and ashamed. They were kind and solemn but they gave her no relief. She sat at the foot of the stairs, crouching, listening to their low voices, imagining what they were doing with their expert hands. She could not bear to watch Mother’s body leave the house and hid upstairs until the click of the front door and the sound of a car moving off told her they had gone. It seemed the worst of a series of betrayals. At home in St Erick bodies lay in the house until they were taken away for burial. The whole street came to pay their respects, tip-toeing into front bedrooms murky with drawn blinds, peering at the body and whispering over it and leaving the bereaved household to its tears. To send Mother to a parlour of repose was hideous. It ought not to have been allowed. Father would have a fit at the thought.
Over everything hung the dark cloud of Father’s innocence. Mother had been dead for six hours and Father did not know. At eleven o’clock on a Friday morning he would be going for his weekend shopping, walking purposefully to the butcher’s with a string bag to buy half a pound of mince. The longer she waited to tell him, the worse the delay would seem, the more unforgivable and heinous her crime. She had tried, waiting for Ben to come home, to ring Father but her hand resisted moving towards the telephone and stayed limp and lifeless in her lap. She had tried again, waiting for the doctor—Ben had brought the telephone to her—but she shook and trembled and Ben had said she would feel better when the body was out of the house and that she would be able to do it then. But she felt no better. She was still horribly afraid. Speechless, she stared at Ben, willing him to make this awful call for her though she knew quite well he could not.
‘Come on,’ he said gently, ‘get it over. I’ll dial for you.’
‘I can’t, I can’t.’
‘You must. I’ll ring now.’
‘No—I don’t know what to say—how to say it—what shall I say?’
‘The words will come when you start to speak.’
‘They won’t—he’ll be so angry—he’ll shout—’
‘No, no, he won’t—of course he won’t—how can he be angry?—it wasn’t your fault.’
‘He’ll say I should have known how ill she was—he’ll think I neglected her, didn’t realize how serious it was, and I didn’t did I?’
‘Nobody did—the doctor said your Mother’s heart was perfectly sound three days ago—these things happen.’
‘Father doesn’t believe things happen. He’ll think I tricked him—he’ll feel so cheated that he wasn’t there.’
‘He couldn’t have done any good.’
‘Oh I know, I know, but he’s watched over her all these years and seen her through all her illnesses and then not to be there when it actually happened—it will paralyse him—I just can’t bear the thought—’
‘Well,’ Ben said, a little grimly, pacing around the room, ‘you have to bear it. Nobody else can do it for you.’
‘Couldn’t you—?’ But her voice faltered and the question hung in the air. Ben came and sat beside her. He tried to put his arm round her but she pushed it away.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘you know it would be unforgivable that your Father heard your Mother had died from anyone else except you. When he’d got over the shock he would think back over it and hold it against you. I’ll ring if you like, but I don’t think I should.’
He helped her to compose herself and brought her a cup of coffee so hot and strong she scalded her lip at the first mouthful. The small pain was pleasant—she touched and rubbed the tiny burn with pleasure as it helped her focus on what she must do. Ben closed the door so that none of the boys would come rushing in unexpectedly from the Bensons’ where they had been hastily dumped, and carried the telephone over to her. ‘Two minutes,’ he said encouragingly, ‘and then it will be all over. I’ll carry on when you’ve told him the actual news.’ He dialled the number and handed her the receiver and she sat in a daze listening to the ringing tone. She saw in her mind’s eye the cluttered living room and the green armchair with its back to the light where Mother would sit no more and at that mawkish thought tears came yet again from that inexhaustible source inside her. They felt cool on her hot cheeks as they spilled down her face. Thoughts like that must not come into her head—she could safely leave them to Valerie. As the telephone rang and rang she began to feel curiously hopeful—perhaps Father would never answer. ‘He must be out,’ she said to Ben, and began to put the receiver down but Ben said, ‘Keep ringing. He may be out in the garden.’
‘Hello,’ Father bellowed.
Her heart raced but she managed to say ‘Hello, Father.’
‘What’s up?’ he said at once. ‘I was in the garden—got it all straight for the winter now. What’s the trouble then? How is she?’
The words Ben had promised her would come had not materialized. She listened abstractedly to Father’s breathing—he always pressed the receiver far too close to his mouth—and to the noise in the background of a police siren wailing. She could have sat forever saying nothing, merely absorbing other sounds, as though waiting for them to form a sentence on her behalf.
‘Are you there, Angela?’ Father said, impatiently.
‘Well, come on then—I haven’t got all morning—I’ve got my pension to collect and there’s a gas bill to pay, just come in this morning but your Mother doesn’t like them to lie. Did she have a good night?’
‘Yes,’ Angela said, ‘she had a good night.’
‘Slept well, eh, that’s the ticket. How is she this morning then? Brighter?’
‘No,’ Angela said.
‘Damn,’ Father said, ‘that’s like her—up one minute, down the next. Always the same when she’s been ill—two steps forward, three steps back. What’s wrong this morning then?’
‘She had a nose bleed,’ Angela said. If only she could cry, if only the tears would tell the tale for her, but now, when she needed them, they deserted her.
‘A nose bleed?’ echoed Father, entranced by the novelty, ‘that’s queer—she’s never had a nose bleed before. What caused that then? She didn’t get up and fall did she—I told you to watch her—she’s that unsteady on her feet even when she’s only been in bed a day—did she fall and bang her face?’
‘No,’ Angela said. Ben had begun to walk restlessly up and down the room again.
‘Well, then,’ Father said, ‘how did she come to have one? That’s what I want to know. Have you had the doctor?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. What did he think of it then? What did he say?’
‘He said—’ Again, her voice trailed away. There was a sudden and complete cessation of any sound at all from her throat as though the vocal chords had been severed at one blow.
‘Come on lass—has she had a turn?’
When the silence continued,
‘Well then? Eh?’
‘Father, there isn’t any way I can break this easily—’ and now Father was silent, just when she most wanted him to bluster and nag. He would be standing at the window, keeping an eye on the street in case so much as a dustbin was out of place, standing in his stocking feet with his massive Wellingtons left on the doormat. Most likely he would be wearing his old brown tweed sports jacket and underneath a grey Marks and Spencer’s cardigan that kept him particularly warm. He would be scowling, disliking the turn the conversation was taking. ‘Father,’ she said, closing her eyes but unable to shut the image of him out, ‘Mother is dead. She died in her sleep, peacefully. There was nothing anyone could have done. The doctor said her heart was sound three days ago. I’m sorry—Father?’
She had never, in all her dreadful imaginings, thought he might hang up. The shock made her tremble. Prepared for the violence of his anger and grief she did not know how to cope with his abrupt withdrawal.
‘He’s hung up,’ she said, staring stupidly into the receiver as though it might at any moment spring into life again.
‘What shall I do?’
‘Wait a while, and then I’ll ring back,’ Ben said. ‘You’ve done very well—it’s all over.’
‘All over? Done well? He’s all on his own in that house—’
‘As he would want to be.’
‘There’s nobody for him to talk to—’
‘He wouldn’t want anyone.’
‘He may have collapsed—he might be lying on the floor—’
‘Your Father? Never. And if he had, he couldn’t have rung off. He just doesn’t want to talk. I’ll ring Valerie now and get her to go straight there. That’s the best thing.’
She went to the glass doors that opened into the garden and stood flattened against the cold glass staring out at the table they ate from in the summer, still faintly covered with frost. She could hear Ben’s soothing tones and could tell from what he said that Valerie must be crying. Why should Valerie cry—why should she cry herself—only Father, who had loved Mother unreservedly to the very end, had any need to cry, as she was sure he would not. He would have gone into the garden. He would be stalking up and down the rigidly straight paths made from cinders taken from the fire—up and down, patrolling, arms folded across his chest, frowning at the last of the cabbages. Mother always said Father’s face told no one anything whereas she, she wore her heart on her sleeve. Angela spread her hands against the glass, steadying herself. There was no escape from the dreadfulness of the immediate future but she must be brave this one last time. For Mother’s sake, she must do it.
Angela had always been afraid of cats—any cat, all cats. She could not bear to be touched by them and if one jumped onto her lap she would scream with fright however public the place where it happened. The house she and Ben bought a little while before Sadie was born had belonged to an old couple who loved cats—not just their own three but everyone else’s. The first month of living in this house was spent chasing away cat after cat—they came jumping over the garden walls all day long and if the kitchen door was open they ran in, expecting their former welcome, Angela chased them away and did not leave the door open unless she was in that room. Gradually, the cats stopped coming. But one day Angela went up to her bedroom to rest after lunch and as she walked into the room, closing the door behind her, she turned round to take off her shoes and saw on her bed a large black tom cat with blazing green eyes. It was vast. It stood there, on the quilt, back arched, tail stiff, claws digging into the material, and Angela clutched at her throat in an exaggerated gesture of terror. But she did not scream. She backed towards the door, slowly, not wanting to make the hideous cat jump, and felt for the knob, watching it all the time. She told herself to be brave. She said to herself be calm, be calm, think of the baby. And she found, because of that need, the courage to open the door and turn her back on the cat and make a gesture of dismissal. The cat was out in a flash. She followed it downstairs and watched it run into the garden and returned triumphant to bed. She had managed to overcome her fear for the sake of the baby. Was there anything, she wondered, that could make her quail now she was to be a mother and had a duty to someone else?
When the last arrangement had been made, the last exhausting timetable gone over, they remembered Sadie. ‘I don’t even know where exactly she has gone,’ Angela said, ‘just somewhere in the New Forest.’ There would be nobody at home when she returned the following night. Angela and Ben were travelling on the train with the coffin and the boys had been scattered among long-suffering friends. ‘Father will want Sadie at the funeral,’ Angela said.
‘Oh, I don’t think so.’
‘Of course he will,’ Angela said, shouting, contemptuous, ‘he will expect it.’
They had not spoken again to Father. Ben rang repeatedly but there was no reply. They had to wait until Valerie got there to hear that he was all right but did not want to talk to anyone. He was, said Valerie, anxious to have Mother home—that was what was upsetting him most, the thought of her body among strangers. Once told the coffin would arrive the next day he was mollified. The funeral arrangements were of no interest to him. He had said they were to do what they liked—to do what Mother would have wanted.
And what was that? Neither of them had any excuse for not knowing. For more than ten years Mother’s funeral had been an imminent event. Her eye had held a loving light whenever she had talked of it but nobody could remember any precise instructions except that there were to be no flowers. Of hymns, they knew nothing, and even burial or cremation was a choice they hardly knew how to make. Angela was determined Valerie should decide—it would give her something to do as she wailed her way through each day.
The boys would not come, of course. Even Father could see that, though there would be a part of him that would expect them to pay the necessary hundreds of pounds to fly over for Mother’s funeral. Telegrams had been sent and replies received but Tom and Harry were lost causes.
It was to his daughters Father would look—to his daughters and to his grand-daughter, and as she thought of the performance to be gone through Angela shuddered and passed a weary hand over her eyes and wondered if, after all, she was capable of it.