‘Your mother tells me that your brother and sister will be visiting very soon.’ Dr Jacobs leant forward on a desk that was completely empty, except for one buff folder which had Barbara’s name upon it.
‘Yes.’
‘I imagine you’ll be staying to see them?’
Anna shook her head. ‘No. I have to be back at work.’
The consultant raised his eyebrows a fraction, and there was a short silence. Then he frowned, as if he had expected something from Anna, an apology.
‘A pity. We usually find that relatives like to have a discussion – a family council. It helps … in a case like this.’
‘In a case like what?’
‘Well, where there is some sort of deadlock.’
‘But there is none. Not now. My mother and I have discussed everything, and …’ Anna took a breath, I don’t think any of us have the right to make her change her mind.’
He shrugged, I was hardly suggesting you should make her do anything, Miss Lewis. As a matter of fact I think she has changed her mind. It seems to me that she has shifted her course somewhat, since you have been here, and that she could easily be persuaded …’
Exasperated by his conviction, Anna broke in. ‘No, I’m sorry, but that’s not right. She couldn’t.’
‘Hmmm. Perhaps I should discuss it with your brother next week. He is the eldest?’
‘It really won’t be necessary,’ said Anna drily, amused to think of Richard in the role of pater familias. ‘Oh, talk to him all you like. He’ll agree with you. All I’m saying is that my mother has made a decision, and will stick to it. I must say, I understand it now. What is the point in her struggling on for another six months or so?’
Dr Jacobs looked surprised, even a little hurt. ‘As a doctor I have to disagree with you – in this case. I always do what I can to make my patients want to help themselves …’
‘I know. I do – really. Four weeks ago I agreed with you, and I was angry with my mother for being so defeatist. To be honest – I thought she was turning herself into a martyr. But now …’
She bit her lip, and he looked at her, curiously. ‘What do you think now, Miss Lewis?’ Anna was not sure if there was a touch of mockery in his tone, and the suspicion was enough.
‘I’ll tell you what I think. We’re arrogant – all of us who are healthy. Why should we assume that the sick always want to be like us? Why should you think that because my mother isn’t too bothered about living she must have lost all sense of purpose?’
‘My experience would indicate...’ he began, but Anna interrupted. ‘Just for this moment I don’t want to hear about your other patients, or turn my mother into a case history. As far as I’m concerned, she’s unique. And the point is this – since my father died she has had a sense of purpose, which is that one day she would be reunited with him. Isn’t that a purpose?’
Dr Jacobs leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. ‘I … I’m not a Christian, Miss Lewis. And may I ask … are you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘But she is, and I didn’t realise that was true, which says a lot about me.’
‘But do you sympathise?’
She looked at him helplessly, and spread her hands wide.
‘If you’re asking me if I believe it, the answer’s no. I certainly don’t think she’s going to see my father again in some cosy celestial sitting-room. No, I don’t. But sympathetic – yes, I do feel that. It seems to me that it’s a pretty slender straw to cling to, but if you cling to it thinking it’s a lifeboat, then so what? Who am I to say she’s wrong? I don’t know, and nor do you. It so happens that my mother feels that she has to die – to be happy, if you like. And I think that all of us have to suffer a bit, or be humiliated, or whatever, before we can reach where she is already.’
‘You admire your mother, Miss Lewis?’
She paused, surprised by the question, then nodded.
‘Yes, I do. Much more than when I came down. I feel … well, fonder of her too, fonder than I have for years. I can’t stand the thought of her dying, but I’m learning to – and that’s all to do with her. It’s necessary to learn – that’s what she says. It’s odd you know...’, a bright smile lit up her face, ‘but I think my mother is making me grow up at last.’
Dr Jacobs smiled too, unexpectedly. ‘This whole conversation brings home to me something I’ve always talked about – how an illness like cancer can serve as a focus, not just for the patient, but for the patient’s family too.’
Anna nodded, ‘It’s – brought me back to life,’ she said, very quietly.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Nothing really. It’s just that I’ve had a bad year, and this is the worst thing that’s happened, and yet I’ve come out of these weeks of seeing my mother feeling tougher, somehow. In a good way. She is tough, you know.’
‘I realise that.’
‘And do you see why I feel that we have no right to impose our view of her life upon her, as if she were a silly old lady?’
‘I do see what you mean. But your brother and sister …’
She looked at him, then smiled. ‘Then will you promise to stop badgering her about standing on her own two feet? … Oh, I didn’t mean badgering, I’m sorry. All I mean is, it’s better not even to raise it with her. The nurses too! The only thing that worries me is, finance.’
The consultant polished the fingernails of his left hand with the thumb of his right, very carefully. ‘That is … no business of mine. But I assume you mother has … er … resources?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, my father left her a small income and she’s sold her flat overlooking the harbour.’
He raised his shoulders in a hint of a shrug. ‘Then she will have little to worry about. Sometimes I get old men and women who come here to die, and they panic that their savings will not cover the cost. They lie awake and worry because they’ve worked it out to the last penny – enough for, say, eighteen months or so. Which is, I’m afraid, pretty expensive. What they do not realise is that they have only two or three months left to live. They’re the ones it’s a kindness to tell, although sometimes even then I don’t. Sometimes that worry is itself an occupation, something they need. In your mother’s case – well, you know that she knows it won’t be too long.’
He stood up, inviting Anna to do the same. ‘I’ll remember what you’ve said, Miss Lewis, and I’ll think about it carefully. But will your brother and sister understand? Will you tell them? I’m afraid that if they make vehement efforts to make her change her mind …’
‘She’s beyond that kind of upsetting. But I’ll do my best.’
He held out his hand. ‘Will we see you here again?’
‘Yes, of course you will. I’ll come down at weekends as often as possible, every week probably, until I don’t need to any more.’
Tom was waiting outside on a chair, reading a comic. Together they walked along the corridor to Barbara’s room, and pausing outside her door they heard the sound of music. Anna knocked quietly, then pushed the door open. As they stood on the threshold, music and sunlight cascaded over them in deafening and blinding waves, making Anna dizzy. Barbara sat in front of the two open windows in full sunlight, her radio turned up unusually loud. Anna felt suddenly light-headed, and closed her eyes for a second, sensing the dizzy arpeggios like pinpricks upon the surface of her brain, as a blind man reads his braille. Barbara made a movement as if to turn the radio off, but Anna stopped her. ‘Leave it,’ she said, ‘it’s so beautiful.’
‘Yes,’ said Barbara, looking wistful. ‘This sort of music makes me remember so many things, happy things. Your father loved Mozart, do you remember? It still makes me want to dance, even though it wouldn’t be wise!’
They listened for a few minutes more, then Barbara turned down the sound until the music was like a whisper, but still a presence in the room with them. Anna could hear the riotous birdsong from the trees, like another section of the woodwind.
‘I’ve never noticed those birds before,’ she said, ‘not like today.’
‘They’re always there, darling.’
Barbara beckoned to Tom and whispered that he should look in the cupboard by the bed, where he might find something to interest him. He rushed across the room, rummaged, and turned round with an expression of ecstasy – brandishing a box bearing a flashy picture of a yellow streamlined racing car. ‘It’s a radio-controlled car! Is it really for me, Granny? I’ve always wanted one!’
Christmas, Anna thought, it’s like Christmas. As he threw his arms around the frail old woman, she had a vivid recollection of other presents, when she was a child, and the snow was soft and glistening in memory, and the tree huge and light. Their house was full of secrets; parcels hidden like Tom’s car in cupboards, and the glint of silver paper in a drawer. On Christmas Eve William always organised his ritual, each child holding a taper to the fat white candle that stood in the centre of the sitting-room window, then taking it in turns (the youngest always first) to read the Christmas story from the huge family Bible. There was a happy solemnity about that moment (repeated year after year until they became self-conscious teenagers who sniggered, so that their father, hurt, abandoned his ritual for ever) that was quite in keeping with the orgy of paper and ribbons and presents the following day, and the turkey sizzling in its fat. Nothing, thought Anna, that had happened since then could match the unalloyed joy, or the knowledge that the love within the ritual, the gifts and the ceremonial lunch was, quite simply, due – beyond gratitude, and indivisible from life itself.
‘I hope you don’t mind, dear,’ Barbara was saying, ‘but Molly got it for me because I wanted him to have something nice to take back. I know you don’t like him to be spoilt.’ Anna kissed her mother gently, saying that it did not matter, that she was kind, whilst Tom fitted the batteries into the toy car, and fiddled with its black controller. He was silent from that point on, putting the car through its paces, pausing only to utter rhetorical cries of, ‘Did you see that?’
For a while Barbara chatted about what the nurses had said, and what the meals had been like, casting pleased glances at her grandson. Then she took a visibly deep breath, and said, ‘Anna, dear, there’s something I want to tell you.’ Seeing the look of surprise and anxiety she added hastily, ‘Oh, it’s nothing about my health, dear, nothing to worry about. But you may think it’s bad news, just the same … It’s something I’ve discussed on the phone with Richard, because after all he is the eldest, but I feel guilty that I haven’t told you too. You know I sold my flat?’ Anna nodded, waiting with a curious tremble in her stomach, for the news. ‘Well, to be mundane I’m living off that money at the moment, to pay for Nurse Anderson’s tender mercies! I’ve got my little income of course, but it’s nothing nowadays, and it is … well very dear at “The Park”. I suppose you have to pay a high price for peace.’
‘I know,’ Anna said.
‘The fact is, dear, that Richard and I decided on the phone together, or rather I decided … that I should think seriously about selling “Ahoy”. You told me the other day that it’s in a bad state of repair. I can’t ask any of you to take the responsibility of having it done up, and Richard said it would be hard to divide because none of you would want to put in more money than you would get out, in use. Do you see what I mean?’
‘He would say that,’ said Anna sourly.
‘Don’t be like that, darling. He was being very helpful to me. I know you hate the idea of selling the old place but I think we should. I really do. You can’t cling to things for ever, can you? And if it isn’t renovated soon it will fall down and be worth nothing. If we sell now we’ll still get a good price...’
‘Yes,’ said Anna, her voice full of irony, remembering the conversation in ‘Hacienda’, I hear the market is at its best right now.’
‘Is it, dear? I didn’t realise you knew about those things. Well, good. There’s two reasons for doing it now, apart from that. Firstly, I need to know that I can stay here for as long as I need to, without worrying. Don’t pull a face, dear. Despite all our gloomy talks I fully expect to be here next summer! And secondly, I prefer to think that after I’ve gone there will be a nice sum of money that I can leave the three of you. It could be evenly divided, instead of all the complication of a piece of property that you want to keep, Richard wants to sell, or whatever. Daddy always said that people should never share property – it makes for awful legal and family wrangles.’
Mumbling, ‘Yes I suppose you’re right, I suppose it does,’ Anna rose and stood by the window, looking out on the lawn dappled with sunlight. It was hot; almost impossible to imagine the storm three days ago. Patients walked among the shrubs, or were walked by nurses or pushed in wheelchairs, and all the time the birds kept up their noise in the branches above. Above it all, in the distance, gleamed the water where the widening Syne lost its identity in the sea. The scene, so strange on that first day, now seemed beautiful to Anna; and so familiar that it was easy to imagine that this was the only world – the other one, of babies and weddings and gardens and boats, an illusion.
‘Anna?’ whispered Barbara, plucking at her skirt. ‘Are you terribly sad? Are you really sorry to lose it? I can’t bear to think …’ Still looking from the window, Anna said, ‘No, don’t worry. I was just thinking that I mind less than I would have thought. Perhaps it’s just the surprise … and I’m numbed. But I can’t go on wanting to keep things the same, because they can’t be. It’s not possible. It’s not … mature.’
Her mother frowned, ‘I don’t see what maturity has to do with it, darling. You’re too self-critical.’ Anna shook her head. ‘No, I know what I mean, though it’s impossible to tell you. Since I’ve been down here I’ve done … I’ve been stupid in some ways. Like a child. But never mind about that, tell me how we’re going to handle it. Will Richard do all the boring things like getting an agent?’ She had made her voice so brisk that it sounded artificial, and Barbara looked at her strangely. ‘Anna, you’re not being honest with me. Are you quite sure you don’t mind about it?’
Sitting down again Anna buried her face in her hands, just for a second or two, before looking up at Barbara. ‘Oh, I mind,’ she said, ‘but at the same time I don’t. I think it’s the right thing to do, by instinct, though I never thought I’d agree with Richard about anything. I do now, but for different reasons. I love that scruffy little cottage more than I’ve ever loved any place, but … it’s damaging me.’ Puzzled, Barbara asked what she meant. ‘I’m too old to play at Wendy Houses,’ Anna said dully, ‘I don’t expect you to understand, Mummy. But it’s to do with what I just said, about keeping things the same, all the magical things, the things you remember. It’s been an escape for me, that house: trying to get back, chasing something out of reach all the time. Perhaps I’ll understand it more, what’s been happening, when I’m back in London, and maybe I’ll be able to tell you then – but not now. All I know is I’ve been wandering from room to room in the cottage in a dream, just as you must have done ten years ago, and now I feel it’s all over. It must be. John, Daddy, you … everybody. So I’ve got to learn to be on my own now – and actually that’s thanks to you.’
Barbara looked amazed, and put a hand on her own breast, as if she were about to swear an oath.
‘How?’ she asked. ‘I don’t understand at all. I feel I’ve done nothing for you this holiday, except be quarrelsome.’
Anna grinned, unexpectedly. ‘Oh, you’ve helped me a lot. You’re a tough old biddy, you know, and you’ve toughened me up too. Anyway, it’s good that “Ahoy” is … er … over. Over for me. I’ve been under its spell for too long.’
‘But you won’t forget?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I shouldn’t need bricks and mortar and a heap of junky furniture to help me remember, now should I?’
They fell silent. ‘I called by at Molly’s house on the way here,’ Anna said. ‘I took her a bunch of roses, and him a bottle of Tio Pepe, because they’re so good. They seemed pleased.’
‘I’m sure they were, darling,’ said Barbara in a far-away voice. ‘That was so kind of you, to think of saying goodbye to them.’
‘Oh, but I’ll be seeing them again,’ Anna interrupted hastily, ‘when I come down, you know, soon. At weekends.’
Tom demonstrated how his new car could right itself, by its own power and momentum, when it crashed into the skirting board. When the noise and their exclamations of dutiful admiration had died down, Barbara asked, yet again, when they were going home. It was as if, Anna thought, she was incapable of storing the information she received each time, because she did not want them to go – or perhaps because it was not important enough for her to remember. ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘but not until the evening. I’d rather leave when most of the traffic has gone. I’ll spend the day cleaning the place up, and packing, and saying goodbye. To the Treadles, and the people we’ve met.’
‘And is it work on Monday?’
‘No, Mummy! Monday’s the bank holiday, but I’ll never drive then – it’s too much of a nightmare. I’ll do the washing; and John sent a card to say he’ll come and take Tom out for the day. I haven’t told him yet...’ she lowered her voice, ‘because I knew he’d be beside himself and go on about it all the time.’
‘You forget bank holidays, when you’re my age,’ said Barbara.
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘I don’t suppose you’d want to drive back then.’
‘No, I just told you! Anyway …’
‘Oh no, dear, I quite see. When is Tom back at school?’
‘Another nine days to go. He goes to his friends, the O’Briens, when I’m at work, remember I told you? I give her money, and it works quite well. David O’Brien is in his class. It’s odd, but I don’t altogether mind the thought of the routine beginning again. You can’t stay on holiday for ever – but I’ll miss seeing you.’
‘Don’t worry about me, dear. I’ll be fine. It’ll be nice to see the others … oh, by the way, I’ve got a present for you.’
With some effort now, Anna noticed, Barbara hauled herself from the chair and walked slowly and unevenly across to the wardrobe. Her arm shook as she reached up and pulled something wrapped in tissue paper from the top shelf. ‘Here you are, Anna. You gave Molly some roses so I’m giving you some. Only these will last.’
Anna pulled the folds of paper apart, to reveal her mother’s tapestry, finished now and neatly pressed. The crimson roses glowed in their blue vase, surrounded by an intricate border in subtle but sombre hues; and Anna raised it to her face for a moment, as if the pictured blossoms might come alive and fill her nostrils with their scent. She smelt the clean, dry odour of the linen and the wool, and looked closely at the thousands of small stitches that made up her mother’s gift, whispering in a voice she did not trust, that it was beautiful.
‘I wanted you to have it, darling,’ said Barbara cheerfully, ‘To remind you of me. All this time I’ve been making it, and moaning at you, so you deserve to have it. It will outlast me, darling, and that’s for sure.’
‘Don’t, please.’
‘It’s all right, Anna. We have to smile about it all, and in any case, it’s true. You’ll be able to hand that on – I think that’s why I love doing tapestry work. You know that it will last for ever, like the work on those Victorian footstools that’s survived feet for a hundred years and is still intact. Can’t say the same for us, can you?’
Anna shook her head, feeling stifled, although the windows of the room were still wide open. She folded the tapestry into its tissue, and looked at her watch. ‘We must go in a minute. There’s so much …’
‘I know, darling.’
‘Listen, I won’t waste energy worrying about you, now, at least. I’ll phone you a lot, and Hilda and Richard will see you, and once Tom’s back at school I’ll arrange it so as I come down every weekend. I’ll stay in that guest house at the end of the road, or do it in a day sometimes.’ She was speaking rapidly, as if to fill each fraction of a second.
‘Oh, but don’t let it get in the way of your…’ Barbara started to murmur, but Anna interrupted. ‘It won’t get in the way of anything, Mummy. Because there is nothing for it to get in the way of. Do you understand that? I shall come because I want to come. I want to see some more of you yet.’
She was moved by the enormous smile that spread across her mother’s face, like that of Tom when he saw the car. In that second Barbara did not look like an old woman, but like the girl who smiled from the wedding photograph, her hair dressed in a fashionable roll; or like the young mother Anna remembered quite clearly, holding hands with her husband in the garden’s evening calm. She did not sound sad, only mischievous, as she put her head on one side and asked, ‘So this goodbye isn’t going to be the last one, dear?’
‘Good. I’m glad. Tom – come here and put that car in its box. Come and kiss Granny, because Mummy’s going to take you back now.’
He did so, pushing against her with such exuberant roughness that Anna saw her mother wince, and hissed, ‘Be careful, Tom, for goodness’ sake.’
‘It’s all right, really,’ Barbara protested, holding out her hand to Anna, and suddenly she sounded so weary that tears filled Anna’s eyes. Impulsively she knelt upon the floor, putting her arms around her mother’s waist and burying her face in her dressing gown, smelling from her lap the fresh scent of lemon talcum powder, and beyond it, the warm woman’s fragrance she recalled from childhood, cuddling upon her mother’s knee, or sulking in tears because of a childish quarrel. Barbara’s hands folded about her head, stroking, and she murmured, ‘There, there,’ in a drowsy voice, as if in a dream, or as if she had become part of the memory, Anna could not tell.
They stayed like that for a long time, whilst Tom stared silently, excluded and disturbed by an emotion he did not understand. As the gentle fingers wound the strands of her hair around and around, Anna felt as if she were melting deep inside, and rushing backwards, buried within her mother, for ever, whilst all the time that fragrance made her happy, the scent of lemons. Outside the birds still sang, and in the corner of the room the radio continued to mumble, its music finished now – a familiar friendly voice telling of future programmes, the weather, and the time.