“That is not a nice way to talk about us. We shall have them when you are out of the room.”
“Better take them away,” Colin said in alarm.
Florence replaced them firmly on the bedside table. “They can stay there.” She met his eyes. “It’s inconvenient for me to have her medicines strewn all over the house.”
“But what if she—”
Florence snatched the bottle up and once more rattled the tablets, in a passion. “They’re childproof,” she said. “Childproof! She hasn’t got the strength in her wrists.” Noisily, she began to cry.
Colin felt helpless and embarrassed. He stood watching her from the foot of the bed, unable to comfort or even approach her. He was used to Sylvia, with her tears of temper, but he could not remember seeing his sister like this. She was obviously at the end of her tether, a woman appalled by her own thoughts. Under pressure, the violent side of her was emerging. It seemed absurd to think of Florence, with her cable-stitch woollies, having a violent side. But he knew from the newspapers that everyone has their depths. No one could be more ruthless in pursuit of his ends than a peace campaigner. In the United States, opponents of abortion had taken to dynamiting clinics. And Florence, so insistent on the sacred quality of human life; would it after all be so surprising if she felt that Mother were an exception to her general rule?
“Oh, come on, old lass,” he said. He stretched his hand out. “Give me those.”
With a spluttering sob, Florence put the bottle into his hand. Mother’s eyes watched them, the little black pupils darting to and fro. “I’m sorry,” Florence said. She got out her handkerchief, with its frill of cheap lace and its initial. “It’s just that I didn’t sleep a wink last night. She was shouting out every half hour. She wanted the Court and Social page, and that woman Blank had gone and thrown the paper away. What could I do? I couldn’t go out and print it.”
Colin put his arm around her shoulders. The feeling of unreality remained. Speech was painful, an effort. It was an effort to bring his mind to bear on what was happening. “We must talk to the doctor again. The GP, I mean. Tell him she needs something to make her sleep.”
“I’ve got something. She spits it out. She just spits her pills out and asks for the yellow ones.”
“Well, we’d better put him in the picture, hadn’t we?”
Florence took a deep breath, mastering herself. “I’m not going to let it get to me, Colin. I never thought she would get me to this pitch. I never thought I would entertain such thoughts, about my own mother.”
Colin squeezed her arm. “Go down and have a snooze. Go on. I’ll stay with her for a while.”
“All right. Perhaps I could get Sylvia to sleep in for the odd night. But then who will look after her during the day? We’ll have to depend on that woman.”
Colin sat down by his mother’s bedside. He might as well be here as at home, and do Florence a bit of good. He might as well sit here with his thoughts, in the close semi-darkness and the smell of invalidity. He shut his eyes. Perhaps he could sleep. Sleep would be good for him. He might wake up and find that his conversation with Jim Ryan had receded a little, softened around the edges. Just now there were fragments of it that lay behind his eyes, like bits of broken glass.
Isabel was different from the other women he had known. She sat still, and spoke very little. He had attributed wisdom to her. “She keeps herself on a very tight rein.” It wasn’t wisdom that had stilled her; it was fear that froze her up.
I know, he thought—I suppose I know—that people who are so exercised about the human condition are often refusing to face problems of their own. Like Sylvia; she rushes down the road to do some good elsewhere. He had never thought to compare the two ladies before. No doubt if they could meet, they would have a lot to say to each other. They would be able to pluck out a few thoughts of their heart and run a little comparison survey. Men did not do that. He understood why Jim Ryan had been so undignified. How would it be if he walked into the staff room tomorrow and said, “Gentlemen, I need to talk to you, I need to unburden myself and hear your advice?” It was unthinkable. They’d make a dash for it and there he’d be, standing by the photocopier while they rang for an ambulance. Yet without some process like this, how could he know what other men felt? He thought of his colleagues; after the first flurry of excitement, putting a minute diamond on some girl’s finger, were they ever again beset by the stirrings of romance? Never: in his view. Stirrings of lechery, perhaps; those passed. One woman was the same as the next to them. Marriage was a practical arrangement which they entered into for the sake of comfort, and which they left under protest when the standard of comfort declined too far. They were inert, his colleagues, collections of cells for copulating and eating pork chops and going to the municipal swimming pool on a Sunday afternoon.
It was with the notion of Isabel that he had conspired to avoid this fate; it was with his picture he conspired, with the far-seeing eyes and mandarin lips. Always he had believed that somehow, somewhere, and one of these days, he would place before her his confusions, his doubts, the great mass of unsatisfied needs that doubled and raged inside him like a convulsing child; and there would be one word, and she would say it, and with that word she would put his life to rights.
And now? There was no future, but that was not it. There was no past; something had reached back and changed it. Had she always been crazy? It was easy to believe. She would turn into one of those women who stumble about the streets, talking to themselves; who sit in bus shelters in bitter weather with bottles sticking out of their shopping bags. She would grow old, decrepit, insane; and he would be old too, and so would Sylvia, a touching old Darby and Joan; and there would be Isabel, legless in a flower bed when they went to get the sunshine in the park.
“His Majesty is not feeling up to much today,” his mother said conversationally. “I think I shall have to tour the Empire alone.” She watched him, nodding in the hard chair. “You aren’t going to marry that woman?” she said sharply.
He jerked awake. “What woman?”
“That woman you’re always thinking about. Mrs. Ernest Simpson, you know what woman.”
“Oh, her. No,” he said slowly, dazed. “No, it would be too fraught and complicated, wouldn’t it? I don’t think I’ll bother. I don’t know why I ever thought I could.”
“Speculation is rife. You must put an end to it at once.”
He rubbed his eyes. “Okay.”
