They sat on the bench. About twenty yards away a middle-aged man about to go jogging was doing stretching exercises against a tree.
‘Those things you said were so awful,’ said Davina. ‘You can’t say things like that. You must think I’m stupid. “It’s not you it’s me.” How dare you? It’s not a rhetorical question, I really mean it – how dare you? To talk to me as if I was your idiot whore who you could just walk away from, skipping away into the Polish sunset with whoever it is you’re going off with.’
‘There is no one else,’ said Zbigniew, ‘I have left you with the wrong idea if you feel that—’
‘Don’t insult my intelligence, there’s always someone else, that’s what people say when—’
‘I’m not lying to you, there really is no person who could—’
Zbigniew for a moment saw a glimpse of opportunity, a potential escape route. If she kept on like this, angry and getting angrier, he could get angry too, and then they would have a shouting argument, which would leave them very broken up, even more broken up than they had been at the start of the conversation. He might yet get away from this … But even as he was formulating the thought, her tone changed.
‘I don’t want you to leave me. I can’t live without you. I won’t live without you. Do you understand me? I won’t live without you.’
She said many more things, all of them along the same lines. Zbigniew saw that there was no getting out of this. She was as upset as Zbigniew had ever seen anybody, and one sign of it was that she did not
seem in any way to be acting, or presenting, her feeling. Davina was genuinely distraught. Zbigniew knew that this had gone disastrously wrong; that he could not leave her in this condition. He felt the pressure of something he had known about, but not quite acknowledged to himself: her isolation, her friendlessness. That first night, drinking with the girl beside her, had been misleading. That had been a new girl at work, and that was the first and only time they socialised together. She was cut off; she didn’t like people enough, or trust them enough, to have friends. And that made everything much worse. She would have a breakdown, or kill herself, and he would be to blame. Everything Piotr had said was true. He was trapped. He felt a cloud settle on his spirit. This was something he had done to her, and because of that it was something he had done to himself, and from which he could not get away. He put out his arm and touched her hand where it lay in her lap. She did not react. Out there in the open air, on the park bench with joggers and walkers and London going about its business all around, he felt the walls close in.
T
he purpose of respite care is to give the carer a break. Mary wanted a break; more, she needed a break. But she couldn’t take a break. When she went home to Alan in Essex, to her own house and what should have been her familiar routine, she found she could not settle. Her mind was on her dying mother back in London and although she wished that it were not so, Mary found that she couldn’t resume her own life, even for a week or two. It wasn’t that she kept thinking about her mother; on the contrary, Mary found it unbearable to think about her mother, who was by now lost to her, closed off and unspeaking. Petunia had turned her face to the wall. But Mary, who couldn’t bear to think about that, also couldn’t think about anything else. Having been absent because she was away, she felt just as absent now that she was at home. Alan would have to say something to her four or five times before she heard it, and when she went for a coffee with two of her girlfriends – which would normally have been a riotous catching-up session ending with her having to take a cab home after they switched to white wine – she found herself having to dig deep to summon up the energy to talk at all. She could feel her friends noticing the change in her and deciding not to comment on it; she knew they’d talk about it between themselves afterwards. She’s just not herself. She’s all over the place. She’s taking it hard. Poor Mary. And all that.
Part of what made it difficult was Mary’s feeling that she was much
more like her mother than she had ever realised. Mary had always seen her mother as someone who was stuck, trapped within limits she imposed on herself, and living only a fraction of the life she could have been living. Mary had blamed her father, but when he died it turned out that it was just what Petunia was like, or had become like. She was always someone who was worried about being ‘too’ something, too noisy, too bold, too conspicuous, too careful, too fussy, too worried, too whatever. Back in her own life, cleaning her own house, tidying and fussing around her own sitting room, Mary was being forced to ask herself whether she was really any different. What have I ever done that’s so big, so expansive? If my mother lived in too small a way, where’s the larger scale in my life?
Since she couldn’t get away in her head, Mary decided that she would do better not to be away in the flesh. After three days at home, she told Alan that she was going to go back to London.
‘I’m sorry, love,’ she said. ‘I just feel I have to be there.’
‘Poor baby,’ said Alan. She knew him so well, she knew that the expression which flickered off his face was something like relief – which in turn made her realise how difficult she had been to live with. Being human, she resented Alan for thinking that, at the same time as realising it was probably justified. So she went back to London on the train, the fifty-minute journey which always seemed so much longer: countryside, the hills and fields and sparse villages of Essex, then the low spreading outer suburbs of London, then the taller blocks and the East End and the sense of old London, of working-class London, the places where you could, still, see the memory of the Blitz in the gaps between buildings, and then just at the end the sudden shocking wealth of the City, and then Liverpool Street. Ever since she had moved out of town this had been for Mary the longest short journey in the world. This would be the last time she took this journey while her mother was alive; the last time her mother’s house, the house she herself had grown up in, was there as the other place she could go to if she had to. A row with Alan, a night in the city to see a show, a visit for Petunia’s birthday – although there hadn’t been many of these occasions, there had been enough of them to keep Pepys Road
as a somewhere else for Mary, a place of potential refuge, a toehold in her old life. That was all going to end soon. Soon her mother would be dead and there would be no somewhere else. It was like the comforting feeling you had as a child of sitting in the back of the car, with your parents in the front; and then one day that feeling is gone for ever.
This late spring had days, or parts of days, on which it had flipped over into summer. The day Mary went back to Pepys Road was properly hot, and humid, with a faint haze about the deep green that the Common always had at this stage of the year, before it had been dried out and trampled on by the summer crowds. Mary walked to 42 Pepys Road from the Tube station, dropped off her bag, had a pee, and set off for the hospice. It wasn’t far. She could walk there in five minutes or so. She walked as slowly as she could and spent the whole walk wishing that time would stretch out, slow down, that the hospice would turn out to be further than she remembered it to be, further than she knew it was.
‘Hello, you’re back early,’ said the woman in the reception at the hospice. One of the things Mary liked about it was that you never had to explain who you were or why you were there; they always remembered. It made things much easier.
‘Couldn’t stay away,’ said Mary. In her head those words had a light tone, but when she said them they came out as a plain and desperate statement of fact. The woman’s eyes registered that.
Mary could have gone straight to her mother’s room, but she decided to go out into the garden first. It was one of those unexpectedly large hidden London gardens, with a conservatory, an area of wild grasses, a lawn that was tidy but not over-trimmed, a patch of fruit trees at the far end, and a path around the edge with formally planted borders to one side. Petunia had come to the garden several times on the hospice’s summer open day; she had admired it very much and often expressed admiration for whoever was the person in charge of its keeping. Now she was in the hospice, and too ill to take any pleasure from any aspect of it. Mary sat on a bench for ten minutes, in the shade of an apple tree. She could feel the heat of the day radiating off her.
Then she went up to her mother’s room. The hospice was a well-established
respectable charity, and it had the feel of someone’s country house in an earlier time, the mid-fifties say, deposited in the middle of the city. It felt calm and ordered and some of that feeling seeped into Mary while she was there.
Petunia was in a room at the front of the building, whose window looked towards the Church and the Common. There was some traffic noise, but she didn’t seem to notice that, or anything else. Mary opened the door carefully in case she startled her mother, and almost jumped back in shock to see that there was another visitor in the room. There was her son Graham, sitting in the sagging leather armchair pecking away at his iPhone.
He looked up.
‘Wotcher, Mum,’ said Smitty. ‘She’s asleep.’
‘Graham!’ said Mary. ‘What … er … what are you doing?’
‘I was over this way. Just dropped in to see Nan. She was already asleep then, so … well, so nothing really. I hadn’t seen her since your big night out.’
‘That’s … nice,’ said Mary, entirely failing to conceal her surprise. Her son was getting to his feet.
‘I’ve got a thing,’ said Smitty. ‘My parking ticket’s about to end. If she wakes up, tell her I popped in to say hello.’ He gave Mary a kiss on her cheek and went off to his mysterious life, leaving Mary, not for the first time, thinking how little she knew him. She looked after him for a moment and then turned to her mother. Petunia was lying on her side with her face towards the window and her eyes closed.
‘Mum?’ said Mary. ‘Mother? Petunia?’
No response. Mary sat in the chair beside the bed. On the table next to her there was a jug of water, a glass and cut flowers. Mary felt the pressure of being in the room, an agonising sense of her loss, of her mother’s death occurring in slow motion. At the same time, nothing was happening. Time seemed not to pass. Her mother, in approaching so close to death, had moved to a state of pure being. Mary found it hard just to be.
She thought: I’m tired of this. My mother is going to die, and if she is going to die, I need it to be soon. It doesn’t matter what she needs,
any more; what matters is what I need. A voice in her head said: Mum, please leave soon.
A nurse was standing in the doorway. Mary couldn’t remember if she had met her before, but it didn’t seem to matter, because the woman knew who she was. They talked about Petunia for a bit.
‘She could come home,’ said the nurse. Mary understood that to complete that thought she would have to add the words ‘to die’. And the alternative was for her mother to die in the hospice.
‘How long?’
‘Not long. A week.’
P
arker rolled over in bed and muttered something in his sleep. The hotel bedroom had been full of light since before six in the morning, because the blinds were flimsy and in any case let in sunshine around their edges and at the bottom. That had woken Daisy, Parker’s girlfriend, hours ago. She lay there feeling irritated by the blinds. The bow window had huge heavy ruched curtains in deep scarlet, but they were only pretend-curtains, which you couldn’t actually pull all the way across. That was in keeping with what was wrong with the hotel. It was pretending to be some olde-worlde haven of calm and order and how-life-should-be, while being full of small modern bits of crapness. The daylight showed no signs of waking Parker, who occasionally shifted and gave little snuffling noises but otherwise seemed dead to the world. Sleeping had always been one of the things Parker was very good at. Daisy, a tad tetchy and underslept, allowed herself a bad thought: maybe it would be good if Parker was as talented at some other stuff as he was at sleeping. But as soon as she let that into her mind, another part of her was telling herself that that wasn’t really fair. Parker had plenty of talents, he really did. He just hadn’t had much luck yet.
Daisy had offered to take Parker away for the weekend to cheer him up after he had lost his job; so here they were in a fluffed-up little Cotswold hotel with a view out of the window of hills and sheep and stone
walls and an annoying fan noise from the kitchen which mercifully cut out at half past eleven. It was Daisy’s idea, her treat for Parker, and she was happy to do it: Daisy was a solicitor and was already earning money. She and Parker had been girlfriend and boyfriend since the last year of sixth form, five years ago now.
A weekend like this felt like a very grown-up thing to be doing, and to be paying for with your own money. It was exciting. It should be exciting, anyway. It should also feature lots of giggling and getting tipsy in the bar and going for long walks and sex. Instead, what it featured was lots of watching Parker look depressed, and listening to him talk about how unfair everything was, and how much of a bastard his former boss had been for sacking him. Daisy knew that Parker had signed all sorts of confidentiality agreements with his old boss and that there were limits to what he could say; limits which, she noticed, Parker was careful not to cross, so that although she knew that his boss had been a bastard and had sacked him for no reason, and was a total bastard, a bastarding bastard of bastardness, who had sacked him for no reason whatsoever at all, the bastard – although she knew that, she didn’t know much more. Except that it was the very worst thing that had ever happened to anyone, ever.
Well – there was no denying that it was hard. Daisy knew that Parker had always wanted to be an artist. He had wanted it from the age when other boys wanted to be racing car drivers or astronauts or pop stars. He couldn’t remember any time when that hadn’t been his main, his only, ambition. His idea about being an artist had been a dream of autonomy, of the freedom to dream and think however he liked, and to turn that dreaming and thinking into making, into – well, not things in the crude sense, because that could easily be a debased and commodified form of art, but into thoughts, into provocations that made other people think and dream too. And that would make him acknowledged; that would make people see him, see him for himself. He wouldn’t be anonymous any more. He would make things and he would be known and that would be his life. Instead, what he was was some other artist’s now-sacked former assistant. So it was hard for him, Daisy could see that.