In the evening Michael sits in the kitchen, upright in his chair, mindful of his back. She has the voice of the self-taught, this grandmother he barely knows and who he has barely noticed throughout the summer. He heard the voice of the self-taught often when his father’s driver friends came to dinner. It is the way they pronounce certain words, words they get all wrong because they have only ever read them in books or journals and never actually heard them pronounced the way they ought to be. And as he sits listening to his grandmother, Michael reflects that they are all of an age and a type, the self-taught, and for all their knowledge, they always betray themselves.
She is used to commanding the attention of a room, he can see that. And with that nose, that jaw and those eyes (in which he sees the face of his father, and possibly himself), he can see that she was born to. She might well have commanded a lot more than the attention of a room had the times into which she was born not made her one of the self-taught who always betray themselves.
Her bedroom smells of age and her legs and hands are weak. But the twinkle hasn’t left her eyes. That will be the last thing to go. And although she is weak, she has dragged herself from her room so that she might talk with everyone, and although the twinkle hasn’t left her eyes, the effort of dragging herself here is visible. She is tired, that deep tiredness that even other people can feel. But she is here in defiance of her tiredness, a cool beer in her hand. The day before she couldn’t raise her head from her pillow. Tonight she has mustered all the life left in her just to be in the company of people. And although her voice is weak, she talks and talks, about everything — the prime minister’s eyebrows, the summer cold that won’t go away, the awful whack young Michael’s cricket ball makes against the back fence. Why does he do it? she asks as if he’s not in the kitchen, addressing herself to Michael’s mother and the woman from the house behind theirs, whose shared fence he shatters and who has been coming to the house in the evenings lately because she is a nurse and she knows a few things. Although nobody says what these things are, everybody knows. And his grandmother’s eyes, the eyes that look lost but which miss nothing, settle on this woman who has been coming to the house lately, and those eyes know exactly why she’s here. Even if she does keep up the game, saying she can’t understand for the life of her why this woman, Dorothy, Dot to her friends, should bother coming by. All this fuss for a simple summer cold. There are sick people out there, she adds. Those eyes that miss nothing soften as she looks upon Michael, seated at the same table, and asks why he does it. And even though she asks the whole room with a smile in her eyes, it’s important to her, and she asks again and again, as if the boy were a riddle and the key to solving him were to be found in knowing why he bangs that ball against the back fence, day in day out. She passes from topic to topic, sipping from her beer with tremulous lips, but always returns to the same question. Nobody can tell her why to her satisfaction, least of all the boy himself. He is her riddle, and riddles don’t talk, she says with a laugh.
It is not long before Dot addresses the grandmother by her name, in the casual-familiar way of an old friend. Mary, she says, it’s your bedtime. And Mary looks at the clock and laughs. She laughs saying that if she thinks this is her bedtime, then she doesn’t know her. She, Mary, is famous for seeing everybody out. Isn’t she? She turns to Rita for confirmation and Rita nods more than she really needs to, and Michael can see that even now his grandmother is still a powerful woman. Powerful enough to have his mother nodding in agreement with her just a bit too eagerly and just a bit more than is necessary, and powerful enough to play games with this nurse, who clearly knows her way round difficult customers.
But she is not powerful enough to resist the summons to bed because she knows it is right. She might once have seen everybody out, but not now, and she eventually rises from her seat with a feigned air of reluctance that barely masks her exhaustion and relief. For the comfort of bed, at this moment, is what she craves. Before departing she studies the room closely and everyone in it, her eyes lingering on each of them, one by one. She declines Dot’s offer to support her arm, and she walks to her room, back straight, head high, carrying the embroidered doily she uses to cover her chamber-pot.
But as straight as her back may be, and as high as her head might be, she will not emerge from that room again. Even as she walks to it, she realises in some part of her that it is more than sleep she craves. And when Rita takes her a small cup of beer later that night, Mary’s face has visibly shrunken, as if sucked in, and she can barely lift the head that she held so high just a few hours before. She can only take a few sips before allowing her head to sink back, deep, deep into the soft-piled pillows beneath her. And as her head sinks into those soft, cotton-covered clouds, there is a delicious sense of falling that she can’t resist any longer.
She will lie in that room, drifting in and out of sleep, all through the next morning and afternoon. In the cool of the evening, while Vic instructs at the Railway Institute, Black will join Rita and together (the matter out of human hands), they will look on as the Distinguished Guest enters the room. His invitation will be offered, the struggle will be short, and the old woman’s decline as dramatic as he suspected. And as he watches, as life is wrenched from her, as the brute fact of the Distinguished Thing at work reveals itself divested of all the fancy talk, he will note as he always does that the body dies hard and that the Old Master may have got it right after all.