Did it really happen as neatly as that, my mother died and I got married? Of course not. Her dying was lurid and protracted. For those weeks in the hospital I was her only visitor, after the manager and a couple of the punters from the betting shop had dropped in, and day by day I sat studying her decline and hoping to get from her-exactly how I did not know, since she had given up on speech-some admission that it was unreasonable to expect me to bear so great a strain alone. I brought fruit she would not eat. I brought magazines to read aloud to her in which she took not the slightest interest. Soon, rather than just sit staring at her, I ate the grapes and read the magazines myself at the bedside while she lay with her eyes either blank and open, or closed, probably more to escape me than to invite sleep. After a few weeks of this my vigil began to feel like an effort that should be rewarded by her consenting to be dead by the next time I looked up. It wasn’t absolutely that I wanted her to die, I just felt that for both our sakes she ought to, before I could be found even more wanting.
It went on. Every day I agreed with the nurses that she was turning out to be “quite a fighter,” while privately I thought her remaining alive had nothing to do with tenacity or strength but was more a failure of skill and application. She hated life, so surely it was obtuse of her to be quite so lacking in ambition to get it over with? She deteriorated, but lingered. For another month, death loomed just beyond her reach like an accomplishment she had yet to acquire.
It was after she finally died that I met Jeremy-or, to be more accurate, that he noticed me. He was a houseman then. While she was alive he hadn’t taken any particular interest in either of us. We had met once over a brief assessment of her condition, conducted at the end of her bed, during which his eyes had been fixed either on her feet or on his notes. He spoke in my hearing, not to me, with no apparent concern about whether or not I was listening. I only came to his attention afterwards, when I was having trouble leaving the hospital.
On the day after my mother’s funeral I went back to the ward to give the nurses some of the flowers. The moment I walked back into its high white space and pungent smell, I realized how much I missed the routine of my daily visits: greeting the nurses, reporting to my mother on the weather, removing fruit too far gone, tidying her hair. I missed the sense of purpose I’d felt witnessing her descent, however starkly it had revealed my own shortcomings; what was I supposed to do now? I missed not so much my mother as the care that had been taken of her: the nurses’ firmly timetabled administrations of drugs and fluids, and towards the end, their optimistic, hour-by-hour regime for her comfort in the absence of any hope of her recovery. The ward was the only place I knew where kindness had not failed, and I did not belong there anymore.
Everyone said it was good of me to drop in with the flowers, everyone said they were lovely but they were a bit too busy to see to them straightaway. I volunteered to put them in water myself-goodness, didn’t I know where the vases were kept by this time!-and when I had done that I saw two or three patients without visitors whose flowers also needed freshening up. I stayed two hours. I had noticed how short of vases the ward was so the next day I took some in, along with a bottle of hand lotion that one of the patients had mentioned her sister had forgotten to get for her. I popped out on an errand for another, to buy a hair net, and then stayed to chat for a while. Over the next two or three weeks I found the nurses too busy to take much notice of me, but the patients seemed glad to see me. I listened to medical sagas of endurance and suffering, I listened to complaints about their visitors and those who failed to visit. I changed library books, peeled apples, wrote in crossword clues, posted letters; nothing was too much trouble. Next to the patients I appeared perfectly cheerful and somehow whole, and they didn’t seem to realize that I wasn’t really a kind person at all.
One day as I was leaving, Jeremy was also waiting for the lift. I was pleased he was there because its sequence of hums and clicks and whines, the little mechanical fanfare announcing my ejection from the ward for the night, sounded less lonely with someone beside me. Already I was missing the lulling hospital sounds: trolleys, soft treading feet, the swish of curtains drawn around beds. He stared at the lift doors, I studied him. His shoulders, but also something in his face, gave him a burdened air.
“Hi. Just off?” he said.
I nodded. He nodded back. “People often do find it difficult,” he said rather nicely. “I mean after.”
“After what?” I said, and he blushed.
The lift arrived and we travelled down. At the bottom he asked for my telephone number. Three days later he took me out for a drink and talked about himself. As I listened, I was thinking that even if burdened he looked, in the way doctors can, becalmed by responsibility. Despite the junior doctor pallor and slumped shoulders, he exuded enough certainty about life to deal with whatever might be waiting for me “after,” beyond the ward; he had a forward-going force that I knew I lacked. And he seemed an intrepid person-indeed the very practice of medicine was to me intrepid in itself: all those intimate, dreadful incursions into other people’s bodies, how did he ever
What did I offer in return? Nothing really, of any visible value, perhaps nothing at all beyond my self as a prepared and willing surface for the marital textures of stasis and familiarity, an implicit pledge that I would spring no surprises. Two years later I entered marriage gratefully. It was like stepping into a clean white room whose door Jeremy held open and then closed quietly behind us.
For most of the rest of that night I drifted through Arthur’s house. Eventually I lay down on the sofa and drew in a long, stifling breath that made me wonder if I was taking in water rather than air, and indeed if I should not prefer to be drowning rather than falling asleep. It seemed that I was staring into dark water from a raft, alive but not quite rescued, and afloat slightly reluctantly. My eyes began to sting. I wanted Arthur with me.
THE COLD AND THE BEAUTY AND THE DARK
Chapter 13: Hospital Visiting
It seemed to Evelyn that Grace hardly spoke to her anymore. They had never found it easy to communicate but for the past four months, since Uncle Les had been in and out of hospital, first with a collapsed lung and pneumonia and then with what the doctors called “complications,” it had got worse. She could sense Grace turning away from her whenever she came into a room, she could feel how wide a berth she was given whenever she got up from her chair. If Grace was in the kitchen and Evelyn entered, Grace would leave. If Evelyn was there, Grace wouldn’t come in. It was if she could not have borne so much as an accidental brush of her mother’s hand. Evelyn longed for her hand to be touched, or to be allowed the lightest caress of her daughter’s hair or her shoulder. It would have helped her to “see” her, perhaps.
But it was many years since they had embraced each other. That was fair enough, there was no call for grown women to go around hugging and kissing each other all day, but Evelyn and her Mam had occasionally given each other a peck and a pat and it had probably done them good. But Grace had never been that kind of child.
Evelyn sighed and put down her knitting. Uncle Les looked forward to their weekly visits to him in hospital on Wednesdays, the shop’s half-day, and Grace should have shut up below and come up by now. If they had a quick
