‘Pamela’s here,’ says my father, as if I am all the emergency services rolled into one. As if I will save the day. ‘She’s flown from Perth this morning.’
I put my arms round him, and as soon as I feel his familiar stubble on my cheek and breathe his tobacco smell, I start to cry. He was the one who was supposed to save the day.
He clings to me, his hug uncomfortably tight.
My mother lies on the hospital bed as if cast away. But she turns her head towards me, and her face changes. Her eyes fill with tears and she reaches out her still-good right arm to me. She does not say my name. She does not say how glad she is that I’ve come. But she still knows how to hug; she still knows how to hold hands. I sit on the bed and she lets her good hand rest in mine.
‘What a relief,’ says my father. ‘She knows you!’
My mother moves her mouth strangely, as if she has been asleep for a long time; but words are beyond her. Through the window, a hot air balloon drifts slowly across the rooftops beyond the hospital and she points to it, like a child who is seeing for the first time.
‘I knew you’d perk up,’ my father says to her, ‘once Pamela got here.’
For the moment, I’m spared from having to find words for either of them, because a nurse comes in to adjust the drip. She regards my mother’s innocent wonder at the drifting balloon as she might look at a wound and she tells us, ‘With a stroke, a person can be a bit emotional, you know, like cry for no reason, or be rude when they normally wouldn’t dream of it. They can lose their inhibitions.’
‘Oh, I can’t see Gwen doing that,’ says my father. He leans on the bed rail and knocks the medication chart onto the floor.
For goodness’ sake, Jim, why don’t you sit down? my mother would say, if she could talk.
‘She’s not the sort to start being rude just because she’s sick, are you Gwen?’
And that’s when I see it, the first time. It’s the expression you make when you think no one’s looking. The one you make to yourself with your back turned. It’s the one that makes all the others look like masks, as if all the cups of tea and all the ironed shirts are just pretending. She turns from me and regards him quite steadily, but as if she sees him down the wrong end of a telescope, or as if he’s a fly buzzing still against the window, which she briefly thinks she might stir herself to deal with, but then can’t be bothered. Are you still here? it says.
But my father’s fond and anxious gaze does not waver. ‘Don’t worry; we’ll have you out of here in no time. We need the Christmas pudding making, don’t we, Pamela?’
She turns her eyes back to me. ‘You’re going to get better, Mum,’ I say to her, softly, wondering if she can hear me. ‘I’ll take care of you.’
‘I took her a cup of tea,’ says my father. ‘Seven o’clock, she never wanted it earlier. She reached her arm out, and I thought, that’s funny, she never does that. That’s when I realised, something’s not right.’
He’s told me this twice before, on the phone. It’s as if there’s a piece missing and if he keeps telling the story, he might find it.
While he’s telling me for the third time, I imagine her waking – only yesterday morning! – unable suddenly to make her body answer to her and praying that he would come sooner. She would have tried to call out to him and found that her words had gone too. She would have heard the kettle whistle and the cap blow off, and the back door creak, and then the silence while he had his first cigarette and let the tea brew, then the creak of the door again and he’d be back inside, stirring the pot, pouring the tea. Then she’d hear him coming down the hall, and the knock at the door – he always knocked, since they’d had separate rooms – and then, at last, he’d be there, the cup trembling in his hand as he put it down on the bedside table.
Now, he pauses his story, and leans over the hospital bed so that his face is close to her, and he smiles encouragingly.
‘“Wake up, Gwen, here’s your tea!” That’s what I said, isn’t it? Same as I do every morning.’
She’s not looking at him.
‘Did she say anything?’ I ask him. Even one word would be precious.
‘She was trying to,’ he says. ‘I didn’t catch on at first. She’s never been much of a one for talking first thing in the morning, have you, Gwen?’ he jollies her. We wait, smiling, for her response, but of course there is none. Her face is stone. ‘Then I realised,’ my father continues, ‘something wasn’t right. She was making this strange noise and struggling, trying to move, but nothing was happening, like when you slam the accelerator and clutch together in a bogged car and the wheels spin.’
‘What did you do?’
‘She’d half fallen out of bed,’ he says, ‘so I lifted her back, propped a pillow behind her and tried to get her to tell me what was wrong, but she wouldn’t speak.’ His eyes fill with tears and I reach for his old man’s wrinkled, dry, tobacco-stained hand. ‘I said to her, “I’d better call an ambulance, Gwen, what do you think?” But of course, she couldn’t answer. In the end, I called the ambulance anyway, because I could see I wasn’t going to be able to get her into the car by myself.’
How long was it, I wonder, before he called the ambulance?
*
A neighbour, Margaret, has come with flowers, which lie in their vivid orange and purple cellophane, untouched and unlooked at. My mother’s eyes are closed, her body limp against the pillows. The nurses have dressed her in one of the nighties I brought in; the frilled neck of it cups her desolate, sunken face.
‘She’s not very well this morning,’ my father says.
‘I can’t believe it,’ says Margaret. ‘Gwen’s always been so fit and active.’
‘We’ve been married fifty years,’ says my father.
The shadow of a fresh concern passes over Margaret’s kind, plump face. ‘I know, Jim. Des and I were there for it, at the club, remember?’
‘She didn’t want a fuss,’ says my father. ‘She didn’t want anyone going to any trouble.’
‘It’s something to celebrate, though,’ says Margaret, ‘being together for fifty years.’
‘We’ve stuck together through thick and thin.’
‘It’s an achievement,’ says Margaret.
I want better words than these for my mother’s life. I want essential truths and real meanings; I don’t want to hear these platitudes.
My mother gives no sign that she hears anything.
*
‘We’re going to put a catheter up,’ says the nurse on our third day of watching. ‘Why don’t you both go down to the canteen for half an hour?’
‘You go,’ my father says. ‘I’ll stay with Mum and hold the fort.’ He’s sitting on the window side of the bed, between her and the sky.
I take my hand slowly from hers. ‘I’ll be back in half an hour,’ I say to her from the door. Her hand lies where I left it and her expression does not change. There’s no mothering in it at all. Nothing that might go with, Go on dear, you go and have a break, I’m fine, take some money from my purse for your coffee and a magazine.
‘Don’t worry Gwen, I’m not going anywhere,’ says my father.
But she is still looking at me. Don’t leave me, her eyes say.
The canteen is a windowless place crammed with formica tables with chrome legs, families out of their element, toddlers in pushers and a lot of bad food. The coffee is as bad as coffee can possibly be. I check my watch; upstairs on the eleventh floor it is the eleventh hour and my mother is dying and I’ve left her, although I know she didn’t want me to.
Do as you’re told now, she used to say to me. Don’t make a fuss.
Would she want me now to argue with the nurses? Would she want me to make my father go away?
She never told me she was unhappy. I never questioned the solid, dependable habits of her life.
*
When I go back, she’s asleep, her head fallen forwards on the pillow. Asleep, she looks as she always has; it’s possible to pretend that nothing has happened to her.
‘I don’t know what it is,’ says my father, ‘but she doesn’t seem to want me here. She doesn’t want to look at me.’
‘Dad, you mustn’t take it personally,’ I tell him, taking his arm. ‘She just can’t express her feelings properly, because of the stroke. We’ve just got to keep trying to communicate with her, and hope it gets better.’
He takes me at my word, and when she opens her eyes he redoubles his efforts at communication. He reads out the messages on all the get-well cards, holding the pictures in front of her face.
‘This one’s from Frank and Julia,’ he says. ‘They say, “Thinking of you, hope you make a speedy recovery. We will be down for a visit soon, but Frank’s mother has had to go into the Mercy Hospital for a kidney operation. She is eighty-six.” Fancy that, having an operation at eighty-six! What do you think of that?’
She stares, somewhere beyond his arm; her eyes flicker. He reaches and pulls her bed jacket closer across her, smooths it down her chest. She turns her head to look at me and her expression is imploring. I pass him another card to read, so that he has to lift his hand away from her to take it. He begins again, ‘Oh this is a pretty one! Look at that! This one’s from Mrs Dobson at the post office.’
He takes up the newspaper and asks her which bits she’d like him to read. ‘“Bus driver had heart attack, inquest told,” – do you want that one? What about “Triplets reunited after seventeen years” – that sounds a bit more cheerful, doesn’t it?’ But she looks at me still. I glance at my father; his head is in the paper and he’s reading out about the triplets. I love you, I mouth to her.
Every time my father takes her hand, she pulls it away. That’s if it’s the good one, of course. If it’s the paralysed one, it just lies limp and he strokes it. She seems to shrink away, as if her whole arm has betrayed her and doesn’t belong to her anymore.
Every time he speaks to her, she turns her eyes away. Sometimes she manages to turn the right corner of her mouth down, as if she says to me, Can you believe the rubbish that comes out of his mouth?
He holds a glass to her mouth, pushing a bit, encouraging her. Her lips are useless flaps of skin, and water and saliva dribble down her chin. He dabs her with his handkerchief and she turns her face away again; her eyes seem dead already.
He makes his little jokes. He offers me the change out of his pocket when I go to get the paper and I take a coin from the palm of his hand because I can’t bear to do anything that is like what my mother is doing. He wants to help, but there is nothing he can do. He wants to be forgiven, but he doesn’t have a clue what he’s done – there’s fifty years of it, tangled up like the umpteen balls of wool in the pillow case at the back of the linen cupboard, you’d never get the knots out, ever. She’s not going to forgive him – the stroke has stripped away all the shades of grey, and left just this one plain black truth.
We ignore it. We pretend. We say she’s tired. We say we saw the shadow of a smile on her face when he came in. He sits on her paralysed side and says to me, ‘Go on, you sit where she can see you,’ as though he is sacrificing precious time with her for me.
She gives it up in the end, all that truthfulness after so many years, and even her own daughter won’t acknowledge it – it’s more than her little body can sustain. I watch her fade and there’s nothing I can do to keep her.
*
After she dies, my father is cut loose, rudderless. He shakes, trembles, has to put down his cup. He can’t remember where anything is.
‘Gwen would know, Gwen took care of all that,’ he says.
He wanders about the house, picking things up and putting them down again. He lets me organise the funeral.
‘What music do you think she’d like, Dad?’ I ask him.
‘One of her piano pieces, maybe,’ he says, but he can’t name any of them. ‘“Abide with Me”! That’s it, that’s the one, she liked that one!’
Among her CDs I find Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and I add ‘Dido’s Lament’ to the mix.
He follows me like a child from room to room.
‘What am I going to do about the shopping? Do you think I should water the pots on the patio? Where did she keep her pension book, do you think?’
I look for the pension book and find a diary, tucked at the back of the drawer in her bedside table. I sit on the bed and open it.
Went for walk in the park. Lovely sunshine. J wouldn’t come.
Made jam. J shouting about electricity bill.
Went to bowls. J took car so had to walk.
Birthday – seventy-six! Don’t feel any different. Lovely call from P. J surprised when I reminded him, shot up to milk bar and bought box of Cadbury’s Roses, again.
Worried about plumbing, noises very loud, taps dripping, leak in bathroom. J won’t get plumber – says he will ‘look at it.’
J upset about fish, went out and bought hamburger! Don’t know anything about losing weight, apparently.
Played piano all afternoon – lovely! (J out.)
‘She’s kept a diary every day,’ I tell my father.
‘Any revelations?’ he says.
‘No, not really, just ordinary, everyday stuff.’
He doesn’t ask me for it.
I go through all her things; everything is open to me now, it’s a treasure trove, so many ways to hold her, keep her, I want them all – jewellery, clothes, letters, bowling-club medals, nail scissors, photos. I keep taking things to him, showing him. ‘What do you want me to do with this, Dad?’
‘Oh, you have it,’ he says.
I want to know the stories; there are things I haven’t seen before. A beautiful green cut-glass brooch. ‘When did she get this? Was it a present?’ I ask him.
He turns it over in his hand briefly and gives it back to me. ‘I think her mother might have given it to her,’ he says. ‘I don’t remember her wearing it. I can’t find the pegs.’
There are letters from a friend, Dorothy, who moved to Melbourne when her husband died.
‘She missed Dorothy terribly,’ I say to him. He’s watering the hanging violet, which died of neglect days ago.
‘Missed who?’
‘Dorothy. Her friend from the library who moved to Melbourne. They were planning a holiday in the US together.’
‘No, she wouldn’t have done that,’ he says. ‘We were coming over to Perth to see you at Christmas, that’s the only holiday we had planned.’
‘But Dorothy says in this letter,’ I say, trying to show him, but he doesn’t have his glasses, won’t take it. ‘She says she’s written to her sister in Portland to see about them staying with her.’
‘Just talk,’ he says. ‘She wouldn’t have gone all that way.’
*
Across the plates of sausage rolls, surrounded by cards and piles of hothouse flowers, he sits with the unfamiliar whiskey that someone has pressed on him, accepting everyone’s attentions. The expression of bewilderment has settled on his face now; it is as if he is always about to ask a question.
‘We had our golden wedding anniversary only two months ago,’ he says to Bill and Audrey.
‘We were there, Jim,’ says Audrey. ‘We were all very proud. It’s a wonderful achievement, fifty years of marriage.’
‘The only woman I ever loved,’ my father says. His eyes are filling; he puts the whiskey glass down. ‘I never wanted anything else. I think she knew I loved her.’ He looks to Bill, who realises belatedly that it is a question.
‘Of course she did, you were best mates, you and Gwen.’
‘You were her rock,’ says Audrey.
‘I’d have done anything for her, you know,’ my father says, as if he must state his case. I put my hand in his rough old one and nod my understanding. He’s looking at the piano and the music on the stand, still open at the last piece she was playing.