When Colin got home his wife said, “Go next door for the Royal Variety Performance. She’s been waiting for you.”
In a daze, he went back down the front path. He hardly noticed his surroundings; the plants in the stone urns were withered and brown, unable to withstand the onward march of the autumn weather. It was strange that Sylvia had not taken them out; perhaps they had died overnight. He let himself out through his own front gate and went round the corner to Florence’s. Really, with all the coming and going between the two houses, it would be better if he made a hole in the hedge. How lucky it was, come to think of it, that Florence had not moved to a smaller place, as friends had often urged her. Trite, mundane, his little thoughts ran on; he knew them acutely, every tiny quibble, but he felt remote, as if he were viewing them down a telescope. Tick, tick, tick. Sylvia and Isabel. Like the Pit and the Pendulum.
Florence met him in the hall. “This digital clock’s gone mad,” she said. “It’s already tomorrow by it. I didn’t think they could, I thought it was only clockwork clocks that went mad.”
Colin took the timepiece from her and shook it. “You can’t mend them by shaking them,” she said. “Not this kind. I don’t know what’s happening. I can’t understand it. The pictures keep falling off the walls.”
“Our house is pretty much a wreck,” Colin said. “The electrics have all gone wrong. Well, you know.”
“My house plants are dying.”
“Yes, ours too.”
Florence looked flushed and aggrieved. “Do you know,” she said, “I hardly had time to take my coat off before she was yelling for me. I walk in here at five-thirty, and Sylvia’s off like a shot. And where’ve
“Better go up to her.”
“Yes, if you could sit with her for half an hour, it would be a help, I could just clean up in the kitchen. There’s some broken glass in there, I don’t know where it came from, I nearly trod in it.”
“Leave her to me,” Colin said soothingly. Inside, he screamed for morphine, brandy: for oblivion.
“Without that Blank woman I don’t know what we’d do. She’s been in with Sylvia this afternoon, turning her. She says she can handle old people.”
“That’s all to the good then.”
“Yes, but I don’t like her in my house.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, Colin, she’s so gross.”
“I agree her personal appearance leaves something to be desired, but we should be thankful we’ve got her. Look, Florence, why don’t you put your feet up for half an hour?”
“I don’t know,” Florence muttered. “Claimants all day, and then to come home to this. She’s driving me mad, Colin. I don’t know how much longer I can stand it.”
“You know they said if it got really bad, they’d take her back. And then there’s that holiday-beds scheme, to give you a break for six weeks.”
“What’s six weeks?” Florence’s eyes were puffy from lack of sleep. “She could live another fifteen years.”
Colin trailed upstairs. He could already hear his mother talking to herself in the dry peremptory voice she had affected since she rose from the dead. She seemed to be making preparations for her wedding in St. James’s Palace Chapel, 6th July 1893. If only there were some chronological sense within her delusions, it would be easier to deal with her, but in the space of a few minutes she could get herself from her early engagement to the Duke of Clarence through to the coronation of George VI. He stopped to listen outside the door. “Victoria,” she said. “Mary. Augusta. Louise. Olga. Pauline. Claudine. Agnes.”
“Hello, Mum,” Colin cried gaily, pushing the door open.
Mrs. Sidney glared at him. She was sitting bolt upright in bed. She tried nowadays to keep her spine straight. “Tell that footman to bring me my medicine,” she said. “It’s time.”
The room was stuffy; the central heating had been turned up, and the curtains had been drawn since four o’clock. The fuzzy light from the streetlamp shone through them and illuminated Mrs. Sidney’s bedside cabinet with its glass of barley water and array of pills. Colin tiptoed over and picked up some of the bottles and packets. He turned them about in the dim light and read their names. God knows what she was being given, but there was a lot of it. He went to the door.
“Florence!”
“What?”
“She says it’s time for her pills. Which do I give her?”
“Give her what she fancies,” Florence’s wrathful voice came back. “Oh, hold on, I’m coming.”
He imagined he could hear the sharp intake of breath as Florence levered herself to her feet. Now he heard her grumbling and gasping to herself as she came upstairs. She was not young herself; all this was too much for her. Now she was in the room, glaring at the invalid.
“I’m sorry. Sorry to fetch you up again. But I don’t know what she should have. I don’t want to poison her.”
“Well, you say that with some conviction.” Breathing hard, Florence went to the side of the bed and picked up a couple of the bottles. “How about these?” she enquired, rattling them under her mother’s nose. “How does she know it’s time for her tablets?” she flung over her shoulder. “She never gets the time right to within fifty years.”
“We want the yellow ones,” Mrs. Sidney said.
“The yellow ones are for your blood pressure. If you have too many you’ll pop off.”
