He didn’t like to touch her, but he made himself bend down to kiss her. What a small woman she was. For years she had been bigger than him, of course; bigger than everything else. She had remained big in his mind, pushing too many other things aside.
If she had a musty, slightly foul, bitter smell, it was not only that of an old woman, but a general notification, perhaps, of inner dereliction.
‘Shall we set off?’ he said.
‘Wait.’
She whispered something. She wanted to go to the toilet.
She trailed up the hall, exclaiming, grunting and wheezing. One of her legs was bandaged. The noises, he noticed, were not unlike those he made getting into bed.
The small house seemed tidy, but he remembered Mother as a dirty woman. The cupboards, cups and cutlery were smeared and encrusted with old food.
Mother hadn’t bathed them often. He had changed his underwear and other clothes only once a week. He had thought it normal to feel soiled. He wondered if this was why other children had disliked and bullied him.
In the living room the television was on, as it was all the time. She would watch one soap opera while videoing another, catching up with them late at night or early in the morning. Mother had always watched television from the late afternoon until she went to bed. She hadn’t wanted Harry or his brother or father to speak. If they opened their mouths, she told them to shut up. She hadn’t wanted them in the room at all. She preferred the faces on television to the faces of her family.
She was an addict.
It gave him pleasure to turn off the TV.
*
Alexandra had recently started, among what he considered to be other eccentricities, a ‘life journal’. Before Harry left for work, she sat in the kitchen overlooking the fields, blinking rapidly. She would write furiously across the page in a crooked slope, picking out different-coloured children’s markers from a plastic wallet and throwing down other markers, flinging them right onto the floor where they could easily upend him.
‘Why are you doing this writing?’
He walked around the table, kicking away the lethal markers.
It was like saying, why don’t you do something more useful?
‘I’ve decided I want to speak,’ she said. ‘To tell my story –’
‘What story?’
‘The story of my life – for what it is worth, if only to myself.’
‘Can I read it?’
‘I don’t think so.’ A pause. ‘No.’
He said, ‘What do you mean, people want to speak?’
‘They want to say what happiness is for them. And the other thing. They want to be known to themselves and to others.’
‘Yes, yes … I see.’
‘Harry, you would understand that,’ she said. ‘As a journalist.’
‘We keep to the facts,’ he said, heading for the door.
‘Is that right?’ she said. ‘The facts of life and death?’
*
Perhaps Mother was ready to speak. That might have been why she had invited him on this journey.
If she’d let little in or out for most of her life, what she had to say might be powerful.
He was afraid.
This was the worst day he’d had for a long time.
*
He didn’t go upstairs to the two small bedrooms, but waited for her at the door.
He knew every inch of the house, but he’d forgotten it existed as a real place rather than as a sunken ship in the depths of his memory.
It was the only house in the street which hadn’t been torn through or extended. Mother hadn’t wanted noise or ‘bother’. There was still an air-raid shelter at the end of the garden, which had been his ‘camp’ as a child. There was a disused outside toilet which hadn’t been knocked down. The kitchen was tiny. He wondered how they’d all fitted in. They’d been too close to one another. Perhaps that was why he’d insisted that he and Alexandra buy a large house in the country, even though it was quite far from London.
He would, he supposed, inherit the house, sharing it with his brother. They would have to clear it out, selling certain things and burning others, before disposing of the property. They would have to touch their parents’ possessions and their own memories again, for the last time.
Somewhere in a cupboard were photographs of him as a boy wearing short trousers and wellington boots, his face contorted with anguish and fear.
Harry was glad to be going to Father’s grave. He saw it as reparation for the ‘stupid’ remark he’d made not long before Father died, a remark he still thought about.
*
He led Mother up the path to the car.
‘Hasn’t it been cold?’ she said. ‘And raining non-stop. Luckily, it cleared up for us. I looked out of the window this morning and thought God is giving us a good day out. It’s been raining solid here – haven’t you noticed? Good for the garden! Doesn’t make us grow any taller! We’re the same size! Pity!’
‘That’s right.’
‘Hasn’t it been raining out where you are?’ She pointed at the ragged front lawn. ‘My garden needs doing. Can’t get anyone to do it. The old lady up the road had her money stolen. Boys came to the door, saying they were collecting for the blind. You don’t have to worry about these things …’
Harry said, ‘I worry about other things.’
‘There’s always something. It never ends! Except where we’re going!’
He helped Mother into the car and leaned over her to fasten the seat belt.
‘I feel all trapped in, dear,’ she said, ‘with this rope round me.’
‘You have to wear it.’
He opened the window.
‘Oooh, I’ll get a draught,’ she said. ‘It’ll cut me in two.’
‘It’ll go right through you?’
‘Right through me, yes, like a knife.’
He closed the window and touched the dashboard.
‘What’s that wind?’ she said.
‘The heater.’
‘It’s like a hair-dryer blowing all over me.’
‘I’ll turn it off, but you might get cold.’
‘I’m always cold. My old bones are frozen. Don’t get old!’
He started the engine.
With a startlingly quick motion, she threw back her head and braced herself. Her fingers dug into the sides of the seat. Her short legs and swollen feet were rigid.
When he was young, there were only certain times of the day when she would leave the house in a car, for fear they would be killed by drunken lunatics. He remembered the family sitting in their coats in the front room, looking at the clock and then at Mother, waiting for the moment when she would say it was all right for them to set off, the moment when they were least likely to be punished for wanting to go out.
To him, now, the engine sounded monstrous. He had begun to catch her fears.
‘Don’t go too fast,’ she said.
‘The legal speed.’
‘Oh, oh, oh,’ she moaned as the car moved away.
*
Awake for most of the previous night, Harry had thought that she was, really, mad, or disturbed. This realisation brought him relief.
‘She’s off her head,’ he repeated to himself, walking about the house.
He fell on his knees, put his hands together and uttered the thought aloud to all gods and humans interested and uninterested.
If she was ‘ill’, it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t have to fit around her, or try to make sense of what she did.
If he saw this only now, it was because people were like photographs which took years to develop.
*
Harry’s smart, grand friend Gerald had recently become Sir Gerald. Fifteen years ago they’d briefly worked together. For a long time they’d played cricket at the weekends.
Gerald had become a distinguished man, a television executive who sat on boards and made himself essential around town. He liked power and politics. You could say he traded in secrets, receiving them, hoarding them and passing them on like gold coins.
Harry considered himself too unimportant for Gerald, but Gerald had always rung every six months, saying it was time they met.
Gerald took him to his regular place where there were others like him. He was always seated in a booth in the corner where they could be seen but not overheard. Gerald liked to say whatever was on his mind, however disconnected. Harry didn’t imagine that Gerald would do this with anyone else.
Last time, Gerald had said, ‘Harry, I’m older than you and I’ve been alive for sixty years. If you requested any wisdom I’d have fuck-all to pass on, except to say: you can’t blame other people for your misfortunes. More champagne? Now, old chap, what’s on your mind?’
Harry had told Gerald that Alexandra had taken up with a female hypnotist; a hypnotherapist.
‘She’s done what?’ said Gerald.
‘It’s true.’
Gerald was chuckling.
*
Harry noticed that Mother was trembling.
On the way to see her, Harry had worried about her liking the new Mercedes, which he called ‘God’s chariot’.
The car and what it meant had no interest for her. Her eyes were closed.
He was trying to control himself.
*
A year ago, a friend had given him and Alexandra tickets for a ‘hypnotic’ show in the West End. They had gone along sceptically. She preferred serious drama, he none at all. He couldn’t count the Ibsens he had slept through. However, he did often recall one Ibsen which had kept his attention – the one in which the protagonist tells the truth to those closest to him, and destroys their lives.
The hypnotist was young, his patter amusing, reassuring and confident. Members of the audience rushed to the stage to have his hands on them. Under the compère’s spell they danced like Elvis, using broom handles as microphone stands. Others put on big ridiculous glasses through which they ‘saw’ people naked.
After, he and Alexandra went to an Italian restaurant in Covent Garden for supper. She liked being taken out.
‘What did you think of the show?’ she asked.
‘It was more entertaining than a play. Luckily, I wasn’t taken in.’
‘Taken in?’ she said. ‘You thought it was fake? Everyone was paid to pretend?’
‘Of course.’
‘Oh, I didn’t think that at all.’
She couldn’t stop talking about it, about the ‘depths’ of the mind, about what was ‘underneath’ and could be ‘unleashed’.
The next day, she went into town and bought books on hypnotism.
She hypnotised him to sleep in the evenings. It wasn’t difficult. He liked her voice.
*
Harry was thirteen when Father crashed the car. They were going to the seaside to stay in a caravan. All summer he had been looking forward to the holiday. But not only had Mother been screeching from the moment the car left their house, but, a non-driver herself, she had clutched at Father’s arm continually, and even dragged at the driving wheel itself.
She was successful at last. They ran into the front of an oncoming van, spent two nights in hospital and had to go home without seeing the sea. Harry’s face looked as though it had been dug up with a trowel.
*
He looked across at Mother’s formidable bosom, covered by a white polo-neck sweater. Down it, between her breasts, dangled a jewel-covered object, like half a salt pot.
At last, she opened her eyes and loudly began to read out the words on advertising hoardings; she read the traffic signs and the instructions written on the road; she read the names on shops. She was also making terrible noises from inside her body groaning, he thought, like Glenn Gould playing Bach.
Visiting Father’s grave had been her idea. ‘It’s time we went back again,’ she had said. ‘So he knows he hasn’t been forgotten. He’ll hear his name being called.’
But it was as if she were being dragged to her death.
If he said nothing, she might calm down. The child he once was would have been alarmed by her terrors, but why shouldn’t she make her noises? Except that her babbling drove out everything else. She ensured there was no room in the car for any other words.
He realized what was happening. If she couldn’t actually take the television with her in the car, she would become the television herself.
*
Alexandra was interested in the history of food, the garden, the children, novels. She sang in the local choir. Recently, she had started to take photographs and learn the cello. She was a governor of the local school and helped the children with their reading and writing. She talked of how, inexplicably, they suffered from low self-esteem. It was partly caused by ‘class’, but she suspected there were other, ‘inner’ reasons.
Her curiosity about hypnotism didn’t diminish.
A friend introduced Alexandra to a local woman, a hypnotherapist. ‘Amazing Olga’, Harry called her.
‘What does she do?’ he asked, imagining Alexandra walking about with her eyes closed, her arms extended in front of her.
‘She hypnotises me. Suddenly, I’m five years old and my father is holding me. Harry, we talk of the strangest things. She listens to my dreams.’
‘What is this for?’
For Harry, telling someone your dreams was like going to bed with them.
‘To know myself,’ she said.
Amazing Olga must have told Alexandra that Harry would believe they were conspiring against him.
She touched his arm and said, ‘Your worst thoughts and criticisms about yourself – that’s what you think we’re saying about you in that room.’
‘Something like that,’ he said.
‘It’s not true,’ she said.
‘Thank you. You don’t talk about me at all?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Nobody likes to be talked about,’ he said.
‘As if it weren’t inevitable.’
In the train to work, and in the evenings when he fed the animals, he thought about this. He would discuss it with Gerald next time.
Faith healers, astrologers, tea-leaf examiners, palm readers, aura photographers – there were all manner of weirdo eccentrics with their hands in the pockets of weak people who wanted to know what was going on, who wanted certainty. Uncertainty was the one thing you couldn’t sell as a creed, and it was, probably, the only worthwhile thing.
What would he say about this?
He did believe there was such a thing as a rational world view. It was based on logic and science. These days, ‘enlightenment values’ were much discredited. It didn’t follow they were worthless. It was all they had.