from lunch, and felt no better, that she remembered that she had left Muriel Axon’s file on the back seat of the car. She telephoned the garage, but of course there was no answer.
I’ve driven up out of it, Colin thought, turning into Florence’s drive. The first part of the journey had been nerve-wracking. The dismal city centre jangled with noise, lights flickered in strange places, distances were unjudgeable. Faces distorted with apprehension flashed momentary and half-lit behind glass, locked into their metal shells, alien machines with mad demands.
“I can hardly believe it,” Colin said. “It’s clear up here and it’s not even raining. You should see it down the hill. It’s a nightmare. The hospitals will be full before tonight’s out.” He struggled out of his jacket and Florence took it from him. “Hot,” he explained. “Tension. They won’t slow down. How they can do it beats me.”
“Is that all you wear? Haven’t you a decent overcoat?”
“Yes. I forget it. I always wear my pullover.”
“You must take care of yourself,” Florence said. “I heard about the fog. It says on the wireless it’s all along the motorway as well. I just phoned Sylvia, to make sure the children had got home from school all right. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Bless you, Florence. That was thoughtful.”
“I’ve made some tea. It’s all ready for you.”
A sense of deja vu took hold of him as he stood in the hall, and would not let him go. Perhaps it was the dislocation of the fog, and his confused state of mind. It could have been his mother waiting, himself a boy in a cap and blazer, algebra homework lying heavy on his stomach. In the hallway Florence had changed nothing, nothing had ever been changed as long as he could remember; the dust was moved, that was all, and came floating back, speckled, settling, spinning in the spring sunlight and drifting on the smoke of autumn garden fires. But the past had not been like that. It was negligence, not sentiment, that kept things in their place year after year. This was the paradox and danger of time-travel, altering the past to suit. His mother had never met him in the hall and settled him with something to eat. She would be lying on her bed with pins in her hair, or still doing the morning’s jobs (like cleaning the toilet), or reading a novel in which a governess was abducted into a harem. And Florence was older at forty than his mother would ever have chosen to be, solid and set in her barren maternity.
“What is it?” Florence said. She poured the tea and pushed a plate towards him.
“Ah, I was just thinking of Mum.”
“Mum? You never called her that. We never called her Mum.”
“No. It’s just a funny feeling, to come home, home from school, come in here. Being a man…in your own house…such incessant demands. I don’t feel always that I can meet them, nowadays.”
“We all get these fits of inadequacy,” Florence said.
“Is that what they are?”
“You feel you’re not doing what you should be doing.” She spooned some sugar into her tea. “You feel, surely there’s more to life than this. But there isn’t, and it passes off. It passes off.”
“That’s disappointment. That’s different.”
“Not really. Milk? Because you feel, if you measured up, if you measured up at all to any kind of standard, then you would have something more in your life. You’d have made something more.”
“Yes. You usually know what I’m thinking, Florence. You usually have a good idea of what’s on my mind.”
“Do I?” She bit into a sandwich and put it back on her plate. “It seems strange though to hear you talk about Mother like that. I never thought of her as—well, as a great comfort. Nor as a source of security. Perhaps because you were the son it was different for you. You know, when she became ill I felt so guilty. I didn’t like her much, I felt I ought to have done more.”
“No one could have done more,” Colin said firmly. “You had her at home for as long as anyone possibly could.”
“She wasn’t really a lot of trouble.”
“She was terrifying, Florence.”
“Yes.”
“You couldn’t be expected to sacrifice your life to that.”
“No?” she said ruefully. She glanced away. “I can’t think what else I was expected to do.”
“You have no cause to feel guilty, none at all.”
“It was funny—” she paused with the tea-strainer in her hand. “I could manage her better when she was ill. It wasn’t really—I suppose it wasn’t like dealing with a person at all. It was before that she used to annoy me, her legs being so thin, and that lipstick she used to put on, all her silly little coquettish ways. She seemed to stick, somehow, she wouldn’t get old decently…and then look what happened. Will you have some of these meat paste?”
“We talk about her as if she were dead.”
“I sometimes wish she were. I often wish it. I think and think…that morning when I went over to Cousin Eileen’s, and I came back, she’d been out, there was her bag in the hall, four months after Father’s death— whatever happened, Colin? She was normal in the morning.”
“They said her brain was damaged. You know that.”
“But why?” she persisted. “Why should it be damaged? She didn’t go anywhere. She didn’t bang her head.”
“I don’t think they meant…I think they meant, some sort of seizure…I don’t know. I never got to the bottom of it. You know what doctors are.”
“Anyway, I feel she
