Stupid, I call it.”
I dropped the curtain behind me which had the happy effect of shutting the woman up. The sound of my mother’s breathing was horrid.
A cylinder of oxygen stood by her bed. A packet of cigarettes and her gold lighter lay close to an oxygen mask. I picked up the mask and heard the hiss of escaping gas. I turned off the tap, then lay the mask back on the thin blanket. I had moved very gently, but something must have disturbed my mother for her eyes opened and she stared up at me. At first there was no recognition in her face – the sun had bleached my pale hair almost white and turned my face the colour of old varnish – but then, with a palpable start, realisation came to her eyes. I was her living son, and I had come home.
“Hello, Mother,” I said.
She said nothing. Instead she groped for her cigarettes, but, before she could find them, a dreadful cough convulsed her body. It was a foul, grating and harsh cough, as rough as broken glass being crushed by stone. It came from deep in her chest and it would not stop. I turned on the oxygen and put the mask over her face. Somehow she fought the cough to draw a desperate breath and, as if she was fearful that I would take the mask away, she clamped her right hand over mine. Her crooked thin fingers were like claws. It was the first time she had touched me in fourteen years. I had been twenty that last time, and she had briefly embraced me beside the grave into which my father was being lowered. Since then we had never touched, not till now as she fought for life. She put her hand on mine and gripped so tight that it felt like a scaly bird’s claw clinging to refuge. Her eyes were closed again. Her palm was warm on the back of my hand, her fingers were contracting, and her nails were digging into my skin.
Then, very slowly, her breathing became easier. I could feel the relief course through her body as her grip relaxed. She had left two flecks of blood where her nails had driven into my fingers. She opened her eyes and stared at me, then, almost irritably, she twitched her hand as if to say that I should take the mask away.
Slowly, not certain if that was what she really wanted, I lifted the oxygen mask away. The paroxysm of coughing had left flecks of blood on my mother’s lips, while the plump rubber mask had printed a red mark on her white cheeks. Her eyes, against her skin’s chalky paleness, seemed very dark and glinting as she stared up at me.
“Hello, Mother,” I said again. She tried to say something in reply, but the effort threatened to turn into another racking cough. “It’s all right,” I said soothingly, “you don’t have to speak.” I moved the oxygen mask towards her mouth, but she shook her head, then closed her eyes as though she was concentrating on preventing another coughing fit. It took an immense effort of will, but she succeeded and, instead of coughing again, she opened her eyes and looked straight up into my face.
“You bastard,” she said.
Then she began to cough again, and no amount of oxygen could help this time and, though I pressed the emergency call button, and though nurses and doctors thrust me aside to bring her relief, there was nothing anyone could do. Within twenty minutes of my arrival at her bedside, my mother was dead.
When it was all over a young doctor joined me in the corridor. He wanted to know if I was a relative and, though I said I was, I did not say I was the dead woman’s son. “I’m just a distant relation,” I said instead.
“She smoked too much,” the doctor said hopelessly.
“I know.” I guiltily fingered the pipe in my oilskin pocket. I kept meaning to give up smoking. I’d succeeded once, but only because I’d run out of tobacco a thousand miles out of Auckland. After three weeks I’d been experimenting with sun-dried seaweed which tasted foul, but was better than abstinence. I dragged my attention back to the doctor.
“She was very keen to see her son.” The doctor peered dubiously at my gaudy oilskin jacket. “He’s supposed to be at sea, isn’t he?”
“I think so,” I said unhelpfully.
The doctor looked like a man who’d just sailed through a force twelve storm, but he was gallantly fighting the weariness in an effort to be kind. “She received the last rites yesterday,” he told me, “and it seemed to calm her.”
“I’m sure it did.”
The doctor stifled a yawn. “Would you like to meet the hospital chaplain? Sometimes, after a death, it can be helpful.”
“I wasn’t that close a relative,” I said defensively.
“So I suppose we should telephone the eldest daughter about the arrangements?”
“That would be best,” I said, “much the best.” Two men pushed a trolley into the ward. I didn’t want to see the shrouded body wheeled away, so I walked back to the Devon rain.
You’re supposed to feel something, I thought. You’re not supposed to see your mother die and feel nothing. At the very least you’re supposed to weep. My God, but a mother’s flawed love and a son’s reluctant duty should add up to one miserable tear, but I could find no appropriate response. I could feel neither joy nor sorrow nor surprise nor anything. All I felt was an irritation for a wasted trip, and an aggravation that I was forced to wait two hours in the rain for a bus back to Salcombe.
Once back at the harbour I phoned Charlie’s house, but there was no answer. So I rowed myself out to
I’d come home and I’d felt nothing. Not even a tear.
Five days later, at ten o’clock in the morning, the family assembled at Stowey.
Stowey was the family home. Pevsner, in one of his books, called it ‘perhaps the finest late mediaeval dwelling house in England’, which really meant that the family had been too poor to trick it out with eighteenth- century gallimaufry or nineteenth-century gingerbread. Yet, in all truth, Stowey is pretty. It’s a low stone building, just two storeys high, with a battlemented tower at the east end. Halfway through building the house there came the happy realisation that Devon was at peace, so the western wing was left unfortified. Instead it was given cosy mullioned windows which now look out on gardens that bring hundreds of visitors each summer weekend. Today Stowey is a country house hotel, but it was part of the sale agreement that my mother’s funeral party could gather in the old state rooms, and that the funeral service could be held in Stowey’s chapel. The chapel was no longer consecrated, but the hotel had kept it unchanged and the local priest was happy to indulge my mother’s wish. She was to be buried in the family’s vault beneath the chapel, perhaps the last of the family to be so interred, for I could not imagine the hotel’s owners wanting any more such macabre ceremonies. Indeed, they only endured this funeral because they had no legal alternative, but I noted the distaste with which they received the scattered and decaying remnants of the Rossendale family.
That family received me with an equal distaste. “I’m surprised to see you here, John,” one of my least decrepit uncles said.
“Why?”
“Well, you know.”
“No, I don’t,” I challenged him.
He backed down, muttering something about the weather being dreadful and how it always seemed to rain when a Rossendale was buried. “It rained on Frederick,” he said, “and on poor Michael.” Frederick had been my father, Michael my elder brother. He was always ‘poor Michael’ to the family; he’d blown his brains out with two barrels of number six shot and the Rossendales had been lumbered with me instead. My brother Michael had been a dull, worried man, hiding his chronic indecisions behind a bad-tempered mask, but ever since his death he had been something of a hero to the family, perhaps because they preferred him to me. If only Michael had lived, they seemed to be saying with their reproachful glances, none of this unhappiness would have happened.
One member of the family was glad to see me. That was my younger sister who smiled with innocent joy as I walked towards her chair. “Johnny?” She held both hands towards me in delighted greeting. “Johnny!”
“Hello, my darling.” I held Georgina’s hands and bent to kiss her cheeks.
She smiled happily into my face. This had to be one of her good days, for she had recognised me. She had a young plump nun with her, one of the nursing sisters who looked after her in a private Catholic hospital in the Channel Islands. “How is she?” I asked the nun.
“We’re all very proud of her,” the sister said, which might simply have meant that my younger sister was at last toilet trained.
“And Sister Felicity?” I asked. Sister Felicity was Georgina’s usual companion.
