On Green Dolphin Street (32 page)

In the morning she lay in bed, watching him dress. He did up his belt first, before tucking in the shirt, which seemed to her illogical; Charlie got the shirttails comfortably arranged before buckling up. On the other hand, when Charlie came to fit his tie, he turned his shirt collar up, so that when he folded it down again there were invariably flecks of blood on the tips from where it had touched the shakily shaved underside of his jaw; Frank never lifted the collar, but slotted the tie around it.

He smiled as he felt her watching him. “Gotta look good for the office.” He reached for his jacket. “Can’t you stay till tomorrow? I should be back by six.”

She shook her head. “I can’t leave Charlie on his own.”

The mention of his name deflated her. She loved him as much as ever,
more perhaps since she had betrayed him; but he raised the morbid question of time.

Frank’s face looked suddenly exhausted, shot with the fatigue of his life’s exertion. He paused in his dressing.

“What do you want from me, Mary?”

“I want you to prove to me …” she spoke slowly, taking his question literally, “that time doesn’t matter.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you say that only what lasts is worthwhile, then nothing is valuable, because everything passes. Isn’t it enough that something should have existed, just once? Don’t you think it continues to exist in some world where the pettiness of time is not so important?”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“I love you so much that I can’t believe that what we feel began only when I met you and will end when I stop seeing you.”

Frank nodded. “That I understand.”

“Therefore the idea of a starting point or an end is in some way mistaken. Therefore, therefore … There is a world outside time, which …” She trailed away.

“Where we can be together but you can still have your other life?”

“Something like that, but not just a convenient solution. An explanation, a way of properly ordering value. An eternity that is more than just time without ending. A place where time runs in a different way.”

Mary could not explain what she meant because her strong beliefs would not form themselves into words. She felt that she could not secure the bliss that should be hers because of some verbal shortcoming, the unwillingness of what she passionately felt to make itself available to words. It was hard to bear.

Later Frank kissed her and gave her the key to the apartment to leave with the super when she went.

She watched him leave the room, heard his footsteps outside, the slide of the lock in the front door of the apartment and the reverberating slam.

Chapter 15  

T
he taxi crept through Hounslow on its way in from London Airport, past the smoky terraces, the wet school playing fields and concrete parades of low modern shops, while overhead a plane dipped in above the power lines. Mary cleared a patch of glass with her hand on the misted window and saw the stationary traffic on the other side of the Bath Road, the commercial lorries and vans, the Rileys, Fords and Singers, fuming at the lights.

Her mother’s imminent death made her see everything as though for the first time. When they reached her parents’ street and Mary looked up to the top window of their house, she could feel the draft about her three-year-old ankles as her mother held her to the glass and pointed to her favorite star. The pressure of the emergency had the effect of stripping time away: the intervening years appeared to have been false or nonexistent.

Her father opened the door and hugged her. For a moment all was well. On the oak floor of the hall the threadbare runner was still in place; the walnut sideboard held its usual load of unread newspapers, orphaned keys and post too dull or intimidating to be opened.

James Kirwan carried his daughter’s case to the bottom of the stairs and motioned her into the kitchen, where he made a pot of tea. Mary felt light-headed, perhaps from the journey, but also, it seemed to her, with a kind of relief. Her father was there, unyieldingly kind, with his adored and reassuring face; on the terrace, through the French doors from the kitchen, the usual assembly of pots and tubs were throwing out their shoots and flowers beneath the metal frame that ran the width of the house with its load of dead vine and dried ivy that was her father’s perennially unsuccessful attempt at a green bower.

Mary took her cup of tea and smiled at him; her pleasure at seeing him again was so great that she began out of habit to adopt the slightly skittish manner that, for a reason neither could remember, had long ago become the norm between them. He was unchanged and continuing; it was going to be all right, Mary thought. In any case, just how ruinous could this thing be? They would manage, they would survive. Death would be … it would not be the end of the world. She gathered herself, patted her father on the hand and stood up.

This was the moment at which she could repay all that they had given her: the indulgences of forty years, their unconditional love. It was good that this effort should be required of her now, when she was strong and clear in her mind, toughened by the demands of motherhood and by the strains of marriage. If her parents’ love had been for any purpose, beyond the spontaneous joy of itself, it must have been to make her whole and balanced, capable of dealing with such natural events. By her resolution she would relieve her mother of any worry about what would happen when she was dead, and take from her father as much of his grief as she could.

Yet as she climbed the stairs to her parents’ bedroom, her strength evaporated. Her legs would barely take her weight; instead of feeling calm and ready to accept the burden, she felt her heart’s affections ripped apart. She thought of Frank, Charlie, Richard and Louisa and felt herself so fragmented that she barely knew what she was doing.

She knocked on the door. Her mother’s voice called out thickly and
Mary went in. Elizabeth raised her hand, as though embarrassed for any inconvenience her situation might be causing. Mary leaned over and embraced her, then sat down on the edge of the bed.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine. These drugs are marvelous. Tell me about your flight. Was it on time?”

As Mary described her journey, she registered details of her mother’s appearance. She had lost weight, but she was not unusually pale; her hair was recently washed; she looked no iller than she had on the occasion a few years earlier when she had contracted pleurisy.

Yet she was already dead, given over to the other side; and all the time that Mary talked to her she had the sense that her mother had detached herself. In the way that humans always push forward, because that is the only direction they are adapted to follow, she was reconciled to the crossing. She had left them, and Mary was shocked at her complicity.

Perhaps the exhaustion and sleepiness that the illness brought on had helped in some way to ease the separation. When you had flu, Mary thought, you did not care what was happening downstairs in the house, provided that, for the time being, you did not have to join in; perhaps, with the obvious adjustments in proportion, this was the same process.

Until she did die, however, there hung over the time that remained a portentous quality; her mother’s words had a significance beyond their meaning because they might be her last. And while she was still alive death remained defeated, no matter how imminent it was; she was still Elizabeth as she had been for seventy-two years, with no change in her place in the world and in the living affections of those in the house.

They talked about Louisa and Richard, whom Mary would take out from school one day. Mary imitated the children as she spoke, and decorated the story of their holiday in France with details and some exaggerations she knew her mother would enjoy; she could feel her fond maternal gaze on her as she spoke.

When she had finished, Elizabeth squeezed her hand and said, “Happy girl.”

It was, thought Mary, a good beginning, with everyone playing the appropriate and traditional part; it was therefore with a lurching sense of shock that she became aware, after a day or so, that her father was still hoping that her mother would survive. He had either not understood or had refused to accept the prognosis, and once Mary saw that this bewildering hope remained in him she believed she should try, as gently as possible, to disabuse him.

In their transatlantic letters and telephone calls, they had proceeded one step at a time: the next test, the next consultant, everything still open-ended for the time being and likely to end well. Presumably James had clung so tightly to this pattern that he could not believe it when they had reached the end. At dinner one evening Mary asked about his plans for the future, about whether he would stay in the large house alone, and all his answers were provisional. Eventually she saw that he was not going to accept anything until it happened, perhaps not even then, and that the burden of inevitability was for the time being hers alone.

Mary saw how her father’s spirits lifted if Elizabeth ate even half a bowl of soup; it was as though he thought this was the beginning of a full recovery. “There,” he would say, bringing down the tray, “now if we can just get her to eat some toast with it and then perhaps a bit of dinner tonight, then we’ll be on the right track.” His love was so instinctive that it could not adapt to reality; it overrode the facts.

Food became important in the house, and the success of the days was measured by Elizabeth’s meager consumption. Mary saw the dreadful effort it cost her to force down the invalid food from its bright bottle, the little fillets of sole, the painstakingly reduced clear soup or the triangles of lemon-sprinkled smoked salmon with which they tried to tempt her. But it all revolted her and each dry swallow was a testament only to her desire to please her family; for herself she would clearly have preferred to die then and there than prize her throat open one more time.

Downstairs, on the other hand, Mary found herself shamefully hungry; joints of beef and chicken came and went; her father ate pork pies, red cabbage and huge apple tarts from the bakery on the corner. They sat
opposite one another at the family dining table, James in Mary’s old place, Mary in the seat occupied by David Oliver on his first visit to their house, and guiltily ate prawns with homemade mayonnaise, then pork chops with mashed potato dotted black with pepper, rhubarb with cream, ending with English cheddar and French bread to go with the remains of the wine.

At night Mary retired to her childhood bedroom at the top of the house and took down from a shelf the books to which she had always returned at difficult times. She did not cry; she had not cried since her difficulties began and she felt it would be inauspicious to give way.

She lay in bed and thought of Richard and Louisa in a cold dormitory, wrapped in the self-protective acceptance of childhood. She thought of Frank, five hours behind, or maybe more, as he trudged wearily behind the would-be president, and she thought of Charlie, back in Number 1064, walking his demonic tightrope, while downstairs her mother’s life receded, the unthinkable emerging into the numbered minutes that remained. Mary felt ripples of panic run through her as she stared at the dark ceiling.

It was not just that, when her mother died, everything would be changed; the problem was that the death threw doubt over all the years before: to think that this meaningless termination was what all the time was lying in wait seemed to undermine the value of the happiness they had accumulated. The photographs in their frames and albums looked ridiculous: her mother in the picture in their bedroom was not a confident young woman in the flower of early motherhood, but a victim, ignorant of the casual annihilation that awaited her. They had thought that the albums with their pictures of holidays and celebrations represented something durable or worthwhile: Richard’s christening (that hat!), lasting happiness, Elizabeth’s fiftieth at Le Touquet, enduring satisfactions, silver wedding party, landmarks and stability. She could see now that they were self-deceptions because death was the ever-present figure that, only now could they see, had made them all along a family of four.

—

On the third day the doctor came. It was not the usual one, Macdonald, who was on leave, but a locum called Charvis, a pale, plump man with sweaty hands, keen to impress with his air of gravity.

After a long consultation with his patient, he came down to the sitting room.

“How is she?” they asked.

“She’s fine, she’s doing well.”

“How long is it going to take?” said Mary. This was a brutal question, but she wanted her father to hear the answer.

“Well, she is getting weaker,” said Charvis, “but it’s impossible to say.” His grave but sympathetic voice made the whole thing sound open-ended.

They discussed the various medicines in her room and their different properties; Charvis wrote a prescription for morphine and handed it to Mary.

“There’s no shame, you know, in letting her go into hospital. They have some beds in the Twilight Room. The only thing that’s making her unhappy is the thought that she’s being a nuisance to you.”