sheet, because the heating was stuffy and airless and you could not open the windows more than a crack. Through the crack the fine spring night sent its smells of greenness and growth, mingled with petrol fumes from the road outside that never stilled or grew quiet, however late it was. He was relieved, he thought. What had happened was merely the ordinary, expected, common thing: the death of an elderly parent, the release from a burden of care. He had not wanted her life prolonged, in the form it had taken recently. He had not visited her as often as he should. He had been bored, when he did visit.
When he closed his eyes there came an unwanted image of his mother out in the dark garden of the Home in her nightdress, so precise that he sat up in bed abruptly. She seemed so close at hand that he looked around for her: he had the confused but strong idea that this present moment could be folded closely enough to touch against a moment last night, that short time ago when she was still alive. He saw not the bent old lady she had become, but the mature woman of his teenage years: her dark hair in the plait she had long ago cut off, the thick-lensed black-rimmed glasses of those days, her awkward tall strength and limbs full of power. When she was still alive it had been difficult sometimes for him to remember her past selves, and he had been afraid he had lost them for ever, but this recall was vivid and total. He switched on the light, got out of bed, turned on the television and watched the news, images of the war in Iraq.
Lying stretched out again in the dark on his back, naked, covered with the sheet, he couldn’t sleep. He wished he could remember better those passages in
The next morning when he went back to the undertakers he told himself in advance that he must ask to see her body. However, once he was involved in making the arrangements for the funeral, he found it difficult to speak at all, even to give his minimal consent to whatever was proposed: his dumbness did not come from deep emotion, but its opposite, a familiar frozen aversion that seized him whenever he had to transact these false relations with the external world. He imagined the young man he spoke with had been trained to watch for the slips and give- away confusions of grieving family members, and so he tried to make himself coldly impenetrable. Elise should have been there to help him, she was gifted at managing this side of life. He could not bring himself to expose to the youth’s solicitude any intimate need to touch his mother a last time; and perhaps anyway he didn’t want to touch her.
Afterwards he went to the Home as he had arranged, to deal with paperwork and to clear his mother’s belongings from her room, although Mrs Phipps had insisted there was no hurry, he was welcome to leave things as they were until after the funeral. He sat again in Evelyn’s armchair. The room was really quite small; but on the occasion they had come here first to look at it, there had been someone playing a piano downstairs, and he had allowed this to convince him that the Home was a humane place, that it would be possible to have a full life here. He had not often heard the piano afterwards. When he had packed a few things into boxes he asked Mrs Phipps to dispose of the rest, and also to show him what she had called his mother’s ‘den’ in the garden; he saw her wonder whether he was going to make difficulties after all.
In the garden the noise of traffic wasn’t insistent. The sun was shining, the bland neat garden, designed for easy upkeep, was full of birdsong: chaffinch and blackbird, the broody rumble of the collared doves. Mrs Phipps’s high-heeled beige suede shoes grew dark from the grass still wet with dew as they crossed the lawn, her heels sinking in the turf, and he saw that she was annoyed by this, but would not say anything. The Home had been a late-Victorian rectory, built on a small rise: at the far end of the garden she showed him that, if you pushed through the bushes to where the old stone wall curved round, there was a little trodden space of bare earth, a twiggy hollow, room enough in it to stand upright. The wall was too high for an old lady to sit on or climb over, but she could have leaned on it and looked over at the view, she could have watched for anyone coming. When Evelyn was a child, when there was still a rector in the rectory, everything beyond this point would have been fields and woods: now it was built up as far as the eye could see. Paul pushed inside the hollow himself and looked out, while Mrs Phipps waited, politely impatient to get back to her day’s business. He could see from there the sprawling necropolis of the remains of Longbridge, where Evelyn’s brothers had worked on the track in the Fifties and Sixties, building Austin Princesses and Rileys and Minis. At night this great post-industrial expanse of housing development and shopping complexes and scrapyards was mysterious behind its myriad lights; by day it looked vacant, as if the traffic flowed around nowhere.
He couldn’t feel anything inside his mother’s space, couldn’t get back the sensation of her presence that had come to him the night before; there had been no point in bothering Mrs Phipps to bring him out here. But in the afternoon, driving back to where he lived in the Monnow Valley in Wales, he found himself at one point on the M50 quite unable to turn his head to look behind him, so sure was he that the boxes of Evelyn’s bits and pieces on the back seat had transmogrified into her physical self. He seemed to hear her familiar rustle and exhalation as she settled herself, he tensed expectantly as if she might speak. His knowledge of the fact of her death seemed an embarrassment between them; he felt ashamed of it. He had driven her this way often enough, bringing her home for weekends before she grew too confused to want to come. She had liked the idea that her son was bringing up his family in the countryside: although all her own life had been spent in the city, she had had a cherished store of old-fashioned dreams of country life.
In Evelyn’s room the miscellany of her possessions had seemed rich with implications; transposed here to Tre Rhiw, he was afraid it might only seem so much rubbish. He couldn’t think where they would keep the ugly fruit bowl, or the Formica smoking table. There was no smoking in this house. His daughters were fanatical against it, at school they were indoctrinated to believe it was an evil comparable to knife crime or child molestation. Paul had given up anyway, but when his friend Gerald came round in the evenings the girls supervised him vigilantly, driving him out even in rain or wind to smoke at the bottom of the garden; in revenge Gerald fed his cigarette butts to their goats.
The girls were still at school; the bus didn’t drop them off until half past four. Elise was in her workshop, but she came over to the kitchen as soon as she heard him. She was in her stockinged feet, with a tape measure round her neck, red and gold threads from whatever fabric she was working with clinging to her black T-shirt and leggings. She had a business with a friend, restoring and selling antiques. Paul called her a Kalmyk because of her wide cheek bones. Her skin was an opulent pale gold, she had flecked hazel eyes; her mouth was wide, with fine red lips that closed precisely. She was three years older than he was, the flesh was thickening into creases under her eyes. She had begun dyeing her hair the colour of dark honey, darker than the blonde she had been.
– You’ve brought back some of her things.
– There’s more in the car. I told Mrs Phipps to get rid of the rest.
She picked items out of the box one by one and held them, considering intently a Bakelite dressing-table set, filled with scraps of jewellery. – Poor Evelyn, she said, and her eyes filled up with tears, although she hadn’t been particularly close to his mother. She had used to get exasperated, when Evelyn was still
Elise put her arms around Paul, and kissed his neck. – It’s so sad. I’m sorry, darling.
– I wish I could have been with her. It doesn’t seem as if anything real has happened.
– Did you see her?
He shook his head. – They had already taken her away.
– That’s awful. You should have seen her.
After she had hugged him for a while, she took the kettle to the sink, filled it from the noisy old tap that squealed and thundered, lifted the cover of the hotplate on the Rayburn.
– I don’t know what to do with all this stuff, he said.
– Don’t worry. Think about it later. It will be good to have her things around, to remind us of her.
