First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (5 page)

“She’s getting worse,” he said. “She’ll soon need someone with her all the time. I think I should get her a nurse. She can easily afford it. But she doesn’t want a nurse. She says you’ll look after her.”

From his voice, I knew he didn’t think this was wise.

“Yes, yes,” I said. “I’ll do it. I’m sure I can do it.” I was thrilled to hear she trusted me that much.

“I don’t know if you can,” he said. “It would be hard enough even for a professional.” Those little eyes were narrowed in thought.

“I can do it,” I said. “Please let me do it.”

He still didn’t seem convinced.

“Please,” I said again.

He gave out a long breath and drummed his fingers on the desk.

“Very well,” he said. “We’ll give it a try. For a while, anyway.”

Arrangements were made for me to stay home with my mother when the school holidays were over. I understood very well that the reason for this privilege was that Doctor Giffen and everyone else thought my mother might not have long to live. But I didn’t accept that. I couldn’t imagine my life without her, so I simply made an act of the will that she must live. I wouldn’t allow her to die. I would devote myself to her totally, like one of those saints among the lepers.

I had allies. Our nearest neighbour, Mrs MacTaggart, the wife of the old Constable, volunteered to make dinner for us each night. Mrs MacCallum, the Baker’s wife, dropped off fresh bread and pastries every day. Mrs Harrigan, whose husband had died in a cave-in at the mine years ago, did the laundry once a week. Miss Balfour, as usual, brought the magazines and books, and stayed to chat.

My mother entered into the spirit of the new arrangement. Whenever she needed to walk about the house, she leaned on me. I couldn’t believe how feather light she was.

She began training me for what she knew was to come.

“Andrew,” she said. “If I’m going to rely on you, you’ll have to learn how to do everything that has to be done.”

So, as a kind of game, I learnt such things as propping her up against the bedstead, sliding the bedpan under her, emptying it afterwards. I’d rinse the cloth she used to wipe herself.

I got used to these things and was glad to do them. Anything, just so long as she didn’t die.

As she became weaker, the games merged into reality. One morning I woke her and drew the blinds. I filled a bowl with warm water and put it by the bedside. I was about to leave when she spoke to me in a weary voice.

“You’ll need to give me a hand bathing this morning.”

She couldn’t even get the buttons on her nightdress open, so I helped her and then drew it over her head. That was the first time I saw a woman’s body unclothed.

She reached for the sponge and began to wash herself. Her hands were so weak she couldn’t hold on to it.

“It’s no good,” she said. “You do it.”

She lay back and I began to sponge her body. I sponged her chest, the dark nipples protruding from the flattened breasts. I sponged her belly, marvelling at the the silvery tracks across the skin.

I would have stopped at that for I was afraid to proceed.

“You’re not nearly finished,” she said. Her green eyes were on me.

So I soaped the sponge and carried on. She opened her legs so that I could bathe between them and down the inside of her legs.

I towelled her off and helped her turn over. I was relieved not to have to undergo the scrutiny of her eyes any more. I breathed more freely as I bathed her from head to
foot. I dried her and rubbed soothing cream Doctor Giffen had supplied for the sores that were beginning to blossom as she withered.

When everything was finished, I helped her turn over again, and slid a fresh nightgown over her. She lay back against the pillows.

“Andrew,” she said. Her voice was a whisper.

I was obliged to look at her.

“Thank you,” she said.

The ironic glint she usually had in her eyes when she spoke to me was missing. I knew she meant what she said, and I was delighted.

It seemed at first there was no halting her decline. She became so thin I could see her ribs and shrunken muscles. Her skin was so transparent I could see the blood vessels beneath. Often I’d spend the afternoon sitting at the bottom of the bed. I’d talk as I’d never talked before. I’d tell her about mathematical problems I was studying, historical events from my school book, anything at all. She’d lie there watching me, breathing lightly, saying nothing. Once in a while, she’d be racked by a coughing fit, and lift her handkerchief feebly to her lips.

But ever so slowly, miraculously, as the weeks passed, she began to improve. Her cough was softer, less frequent. She was able to bathe herself. She could get out of bed. There were no more handkerchiefs with frightening red polka dots. Sometimes, as she padded along the floor without having to lean on me, she’d nod to me, as if to say: We may prevail yet!

Doctor Giffen, who dropped in to see her each afternoon, seemed happy with her progress.

“She’s looking a lot better,” he said. “Well done, Andrew. You’re a good nurse.”

I was happy. I let down my guard. I allowed myself, for the first time in months, to feel secure.

On a morning near the beginning of March, I woke around six-thirty. It was still dark. I lay for a while making a plan. When the warm weather came in, I would coax her to come with me on the train to the coast. She could sit on the beach for a few days. I’d heard Doctor Giffen say the salt air would help mend her scarred lungs.

When I eventually got out of bed, I shivered into my clothes and slipped downstairs into the dark living-room. She was still asleep. The embers of the fire were glowing, so I added some kindling and a few pieces of coal. The room would be cheerful for her when she ate breakfast.

Then I went into the kitchen and boiled some oatmeal. I heated the milk the way she liked it. I put the plate on the tray and took it into the living-room. I set the tray down on the chair beside her bed and switched on the light. Her eyes were open but she didn’t look at me. Her face, her whole body seemed somehow to have shrunk.

I think I knew the awful truth right away, but I tried not to face it.

“Mother, I’ve a great idea,” I said. I had trouble speaking. “When the weather warms up, we’ll go to the coast and sit at the beach. Maybe you can watch while I swim. I’ll collect shells for you. It’ll be great fun.”

Her face was grey, and her lips were twisted a little; her eyes were flat as though coins had already been laid upon them. She was quite dead.

I began to weep, as much from anger as from grief. How could she have betrayed me this way? I went crazy. I began to search the living-room, throwing open cupboard doors and drawers, searching for evidence of her treachery. It didn’t take me long to find it. The narrow drawer at the
bottom of the armoire near the bed was her hiding place. Rags were stuffed into it, rags spotted with blood in its various shades and consistencies, mostly dark brown, some more recent and red. I looked at her now, and from where I was, the light caused her eyes to gleam and the twist on her lips seemed to be a smile.

And suddenly I was calm, and I couldn’t help admiring her for her deception. It was exactly what I would have expected of her. What strength of will she must have had to keep her condition hidden from me, and from Doctor Giffen, and from everyone else who visited her.

What could I do but forgive her?

S
O
I
WENT TO HER FUNERAL
, in harsh Upland weather: sleety rain and a cold March wind—perfect funeral weather. The blunt hills around the graveyard were themselves like massive burial mounds. As for the graveyard, the orderly arrangement of the plots, the symmetry of the paths, seemed to mock the chaos her death had made of my life.

Provost Hawse read the rites as the northeaster whined its lament. Doctor Giffen stood beside me. Otherwise, the gathering consisted mainly of women in black coats and fluttering black headscarves.

When the coffin was lowered into the grave, the Provost turned to me. His beaky face never seemed more at home than here in the graveyard.

“Andrew Halfnight, you may proceed now,” he said.

It was my duty to throw the first clod of earth into my mother’s grave. I picked up a piece of mud and tried to drop it gently onto the elegant coffin in its muddy hole. But there was no way of dropping it softly—it thudded onto the lid. Then Doctor Giffen and the women around the grave threw a barrage of clods into the grave, some of them fiercely as though they were stoning the corpse, or perhaps stoning death itself.

Then everything was quiet except for the wind’s whine, and the rattle of the rain on the parts of the coffin lid that were still exposed.

In the days after the funeral, I lived with Doctor Giffen. His surgery was in the Square, next to Glenn’s Pharmacy. His living quarters were in the rooms directly above. The smell of ether had worked its way through the floorboards and was on my clothes, even in the food. It pervaded my dreams. But when Doctor Giffen took me to the big house for one last visit, it was the stale smell of her sickness that rushed out to meet us.

He said he’d stay outside and I went in alone. I found a leather suitcase and packed what I needed—my clothes and a few books. The living-room was cold and clammy, the bed stripped to the mattress by the women who had come to embalm my mother. From the mantelpiece above the dead fire, I lifted the photograph of her as a young woman. She was standing in the snow with the man I knew as my father beside her. They weren’t looking at the camera so much as at whoever was taking the photo. My mother was quite beautiful, her lips twisted in that ironic way that might pass for a smile.

I would have put the photograph in my suitcase, but it was too big. So I put it back on the mantelpiece. I left the house quickly, for in it, her memory was only a cold presence.

That night, I was asleep in Doctor Giffen’s spare room, when the sound of loud sobbing woke me up. I didn’t breathe. I listened carefully, wondering who was weeping so uncontrollably. Nothing. I could hear nothing. Then I realized my own cheeks were cold and wet. I was the one who had been weeping.

Doctor Giffen was rarely at meals, and I was glad, for he was a hard man to talk to and I never knew what he was thinking. He had instructed his maid to cook for me whatever I wished. But on the second night, he did come to dinner. We didn’t talk much during it. After the dishes had been removed at the end and he was sipping his coffee, he cleared his throat.

“Your mother, Andrew. I was very …”

He cleared his throat again.

“I don’t know how to say it.…” He sat there for a long time, not saying anything. Then he got up slowly and left.

I understood he had been trying to tell me he loved her. He didn’t know how to do it, and I understood that, too. Afterwards, even though I always felt a little uncomfortable with him, I didn’t mind him so much.

He came to the bus stop with me the morning I left. It was a Wednesday, before dawn. Icy rain made the day miserable as we stood in the Square waiting for the weekly bus to the City. He held his umbrella over us. Within its enclosure the smell of ether was especially strong. If I was thinking coherently at all, it was that I was sad to be leaving the only place and the only human beings I knew. Yet at the same time, I was glad to go. He must have read my mind.

“Living here won’t be easy now,” he said. I knew he meant now that she was gone.

The bus appeared like a grumbling monster out of the
murk and hissed to a halt. Doctor Giffen leaned inside and gave the driver instructions about where I was to get off. Then he shook my hand formally and helped me on with my suitcase.

I walked along the passageway. There were no other passengers and the bus smelt of stale cigarette smoke. I took a seat near the middle and wiped the condensation from the window with my sleeve. Doctor Giffen was standing on the street, looking up at me. Gears crashed and the bus lurched forward. I waved to him and he waved back. He remained standing as the bus groaned its way slowly along the street.

In a minute we were out of the town, and passing the graveyard. I cleared the window again and tried to make out the area of her grave. I could see nothing but the ghostly shapes of some of the larger gravestones. My heart was empty. I felt the way an animal must feel, wrenched away from its lair.

And so, once again, in spite of everything she taught me, I began to cry. I used the camouflage of the noisy bus and cried till Stroven was far behind. I exhausted myself with sobbing, and as I fell asleep, I felt I was hopelessly tumbling with the hopelessly tumbling earth.

D
OCTOR
G
IFFEN HAD
arranged for me to stay for a few days in Glasgow till the ship was ready to sail. The Hochmagandie Hotel was in the middle of a run-down four-storey tenement by the docks. It looked like the least decayed tooth in a mouthful of bad teeth. The reception
desk was just inside the entrance. The clerk was an adult, but no taller than I was, his legs were so bowed. He wore a black leather cone over his nose, and a black waistcoat that read “Hochmagandie” in faded gilt at his heart.

“You can have the room over the river. Doctor Giffen stays there when he’s in town,” he said. He had a way about him I’d never seen before—a city toughness.

The room itself was clean though the bedcover had ancient stains on it. In one corner was a little stall with a shower in it, and a toilet that was cracked and rusted with age. A locked door connected to the next room. From the window I could see across a wide cobbled street dissected by rail-lines, to the oily, brown river. The docks were studded with giant bollards; cranes were loading cargo into rusty freighters. Even through the glass, I could hear their clanking and screeching, and the snarling of trucks doing their business. The sky was grey with low black clouds that seemed not much higher than the cranes. Working men in dungarees and cloth caps milled around the loading areas.

I was very hungry, but the Hochmagandie had no restaurant, only a bar. So, around three o’clock, I took some money from an envelope Doctor Giffen had given me, put on my coat and went out to find a place to eat. The air was a mix of coal smoke and tar and salt water—the sea was only a few miles downriver. I found a restaurant in the next block. It was the plainest of places, with brown panelled walls. Men in dungarees sat at small wooden tables covered with plastic cloths. Tobacco smoke mingled with the smell of fried fish and chips. I ate quickly and went back outside.