Somebody Loves Us All (36 page)

What was there to do?

Paddy lay down beside him, and they watched at eye-level as the car sped back along the grass matting floor straight at them. The tiny headlights came jerkily through the dimness. Geoff kept his thumb pressed forward on the controls. Paddy stared into the lights. The car wasn’t slowing. He felt it was going to smash into his face. But he kept still.

At the final moment, the car stopped dead. It was an inch from Paddy’s nose.

Geoff picked up the car and inspected it. He blew on the wheels and rubbed lightly against a spot on the bonnet. They stood up. ‘That wasn’t all-out.’

‘Goodnight,’ said Paddy, and he walked back to his apartment.

His mother didn’t want to be watched and didn’t need to be looked after while she was having the MRI. No tremors this time, no sedatives. She would have to wear earplugs because of the noise as the magnets crunched around. Paddy warned her about this in the car on their way to the hospital and she nodded. Fine. She was in a new state of composure and resolve. ‘Go and have a coffee,’ she told them once they’d delivered her to the right room. She was filling in forms.

Blanchford wasn’t there. He’d phoned to say that he’d look at the images as soon as he could. His casual approach helped them all now.

She sent them away, even Pip, and they had to go, no matter what they said.

They went to one of the cafés across the road from the hospital. Pip was asking Stephanie about her children, showing again a genuine delight in any subject connected with her cousin. She heard about ballet and gym and teeth. Steph talked about their mother’s involvement in the kids’ lives, how important she’d been, really things would have collapsed in a heap without her, she said, and then she started crying. Pip put her hand on Stephanie’s arm. ‘You’ve given her that joy,’ she said.

Stephanie shivered, as if shaking off this idea. ‘I try to look at her life, to work out whether she’s had one, a life. I mean something separate from us. Even this morning when I woke up, I remembered I had an appointment and I thought immediately
of dropping the two youngest ones with Mummy. And then I remembered the appointment was this!’ She looked at her watch. ‘And look, soon I need to go again, pick them up. But I feel terrible leaving you here, leaving her.’

Paddy told her it would be okay, and that they’d call her later. She could speak to Teresa, who was obviously stronger today, properly rested and full of determination. He turned to Pip and said, ‘Your visit has really helped.’

‘Yes!’ said Stephanie.

‘No, I was never able to influence your mother a single bit.’

This was said without a trace of irritation or regret, which made Paddy think there’d been influence on both sides. The cousins shared an instinct for facts. Pip was more demonstrative, that was clear. But both of them were clear-eyed to the point of starkness.

‘She’s so hard to know,’ he said, almost thoughtlessly. It came out. His starkness was different—it was the stuff of frustrated feeling. He sounded churlish.

‘Impossible to know,’ said Pip, quite cheerfully.

Stephanie leaned forward. ‘You can’t know her, but you can know how she affects you.’

A waitress had come to clean the table. She took their cups.

Branch-to-branch style, and perhaps to escape the previous topic, Stephanie started asking Pip about Zimbabwe. Did she miss it? Yes. Would she go back? Maybe one day to visit. Paddy asked about her meeting with the lawyer and whether things were going to be put into action regarding her land.

‘It’s wait and see, I’m afraid.’

‘It’s wait and see everywhere, isn’t it,’ said Stephanie, gesturing in the direction of the hospital, sounding as though she might start crying again. She managed to hold it off, converting her emotion into a short gulped laugh. She stood up suddenly, and tried to unhook her shoulder bag from the back of the seat. Its strap was tangled; she pulled and the chair fell over with a loud clatter. ‘Fuck,’ she said. ‘Excuse me, sorry.’ Paddy was straightening the chair and releasing her bag.

Pip was also standing. ‘Darling Stephanie, darling Patrick. How proud she is of you. And Margaret. How she loves you and wishes that you go on and achieve all the things you hope for. Yes. You’re what she speaks about when she talks to me. You’re the great subject. That’s a life, Steph. That’s a large life. But I think this too. There’s always something else. Don’t you think? There’s always more. Of course there is. That’s the mystery of us all.’

The speech stopped them from saying anything more as they left the café and crossed the road back to the hospital. Paddy had found Pip’s presence vaguely irritating. It was also unusual for Stephanie to be silent for long. She was walking slightly ahead of them, a stiffness in her body that he recognised as upset of a peculiarly humiliating sort.

Their mother’s cousin, he thought, was both a stranger and not one at all. She was hard to place finally, knowing a little too much about them and not knowing anything, at least through direct experience of their lives. All she’d experienced had come through their mother. That was one reason to resist. Something too in the word ‘mystery’ perhaps, which suggested Philippa from Africa was on the point of claiming spiritual properties for truth. Was she, endlessly mild and kind and strong, meeting all this through some unannounced attachment to a church? Well, did it matter? She’d been through a real hell in Zimbabwe. The murder, the blindfold, the chicken coop. She’d seen Robert Mugabe on a bicycle. And it wasn’t only God she was calling on now; she had a lawyer.

They arranged to bring Teresa home in a taxi.

Mystery, the word still bothered him. He thought of Geoff Harley lying on his stomach, watching his toy car race along the corridor. Was that Geoff’s ‘mystery’ uncovered? Or had it just been the aspect of himself he was prepared to show at 11pm, in a moment of shared weakness, to a barefoot man in a coat and pyjamas?

Of course playing on them all was the terrible anxiety of what was happening in the building in front of them, from
which they’d been banished. Their mother in a cylinder of noise, her head fastened in place.

Suddenly he missed Margie.

A few weeks after their father’s death all those years ago, a man had come to the house with a box for their mother, who wasn’t there. Margie had answered the door. She must have been seventeen. The man asked if he could leave the box for Teresa. It was his doctoral thesis, he said, and their mother had agreed to type it up for him. Inside the box was also an envelope, with the first instalment of his payment for the work. Paddy was standing behind his sister.

They both remembered the period before Stephanie was born, when their mother had taken on typing work at home. She would close the door of the little study, put on the headset, and then for an hour, two hours, three, the only sound they heard was the snapping of the typewriter, the bell sounding at the end of each line, followed by the creak of the paper as it was pulled up across the roller, then the resumed clack. They both loathed this noise. It was as though their mother had become a machine, was remaking herself with the hateful little hammers of each letter behind the closed door, composing a message of fury. Yet when she stepped out of the room, she was the same mild person. She was ready to cook them dinner.

Margie looked at the box in the man’s hands. He wore glasses, a blue-black suit jacket greasy around the shoulders. Paddy had no idea what a doctoral thesis was—the word ‘thesis’ sounded close to faeces which he knew was shit. ‘It’s all in here,’ he said, ‘my baby. Three years’ hard labour.’

Did they both imagine a foetus in the box?

And then Margie said, ‘No, sorry, our mother changed her mind. Perhaps you didn’t get her message. She’s too busy. Can’t do it. Very sorry. Goodbye.’ And she closed the door. They could see the shape of the man’s head behind the frosted glass panel. He waited a moment and then he left.

They’d come in Stephanie’s car, which was in the hospital
car park. ‘Stupid!’ she said. ‘We should have brought two cars. Paddy, why didn’t we bring your car too?’

‘Didn’t think,’ he said.

‘I should have brought mine,’ said Pip.

‘No,’ said Stephanie. ‘You’ve done too much already.’ For a moment it sounded as though she was warning Pip off, or venting a portion of the dissatisfaction she’d felt back in the café. Here was the person who’d first tried to steal their mother away before she was even their mother, and then who’d tried to steal them all away. Quickly, as if to smother her animosity, she embraced their mother’s cousin.

The days passed in an odd sort of normality. Pip stayed on with Teresa in her apartment and the two cousins went out for trips in Pip’s car, up the Kapiti Coast, then to Eastbourne, and to see good old Lower Hutt and visit the Dowse, recently redesigned. ‘Too many doors, entranceways,’ his mother said. ‘Otherwise good.’ They admitted driving past the old house, where they saw that the two small kowhai trees, which over the years had slightly encroached on the driveway, were gone. When the trees flowered, a soft yellow light was filtered into the nearest part of the living-room, where Brendan had had his reading chair, known as ‘the yellow chair’ though its covering was blue. Teresa met this blow unconvincingly. ‘Probably they have a wider car. It makes sense.’

Paddy held his clinics as usual, working unimpeded and, he considered, to decent effect. He didn’t feel impatient while his kids were in the room. He gave them all his attention. And he had no problems with his right ear.

Stephanie phoned him every morning and again at night. She spoke without tears, reasonably and in a new mood of resilience. Their mother’s example was powerful. One of the girls had a bad cold. Instead of bringing the germs round, she Skyped Teresa whenever she could. She told him she’d picked up part-time work that she could do from home. Before the children were
born Stephanie had been a market researcher, on the statistical side of things. Her reputation as a scatterbrain concealed a fine intuitive feel for numbers and patterns. Her old boss had given her the contract and in the future she could increase her hours if she wanted to. That could pay for a nanny. Paul Shawn had also come round and she’d not even let him in the house. ‘Are you proud of me?’ she said.

He was.

Apparently Paul had acted very concerned about Teresa. ‘This is the man who, as you might remember, when Mummy was having her seventieth birthday party, chose to paint the bathroom ceiling instead of come with me to the dinner. He told me he was doing it for me, so I’d be out of the house and the fumes wouldn’t make me nauseous.’

‘He doesn’t need a can of paint to make me feel nauseous,’ said Paddy.

She’d laughed at that.

When Pip and Teresa came home from their outings, they didn’t knock on his door and they didn’t ring him. Perhaps they’d missed a call but this didn’t matter—he’d tell them. Later they would come across for a glass of wine and they’d talk about the world, financial ruin, Barack Obama, about Helena’s life before she met Paddy. Days in the Alps. The gardening job. They desired news that didn’t quite touch them. It was perfectly understood by everyone that the moment Murray Blanchford called, everything that they’d built up over these days would be swept away.

Occasionally he caught a look on his mother’s face that gave away the strain. He thought how waiting for the scan results allowed them two kinds of time. There was the easy regular flow of hours, in his case divided into sixty-minute clinic sessions, which you noticed because you were inside it, the day carved around you, like a fingernail going through soap. Then some other kind altogether. A thicker substance, reflective, heavy, possibly harmful. It was as though you were waiting not only for the future—Blanchford’s call, the consequences of a
single sentence—but for the past too. Events from long ago were catching up, coming closer. Was this what disease meant? All time pressed together into a space that couldn’t possibly contain it.

After his father died, he didn’t sleepwalk again. Because he’d outgrown it. But how did he know he hadn’t carried on doing it? His mother might have chosen to keep this from him. In bed at night during this period he used to tell himself, You were the Messenger. You tried to warn him. Your father saw you were the Messenger and he froze. He developed a long tale about Messengers, probably drawn from his reading, maybe Alan Garner.

He and Helena made love every night for six nights. Outside their courtship, a record probably. It was as though they were in training, he thought, the only difference being that this itself, the thing they were doing, was what they were training for. Which qualified it, in his mind, as the world’s greatest sport. Utterly self-reflexive.

When he went to bed, he’d sit up with a book on his chest, while she always read under the covers, lying down.

After The Six Nights, when she’d turned off her side-light, he kept reading. She looked at him and said, And on the seventh night he rested.

They both laughed.

She said, ‘You remind me of that bit in
Der Zauberberg
.’

‘In what?’ he said.

‘
The Magic Mountain
.’

‘Ah.’ He was immediately sensitised. Rapid tingling. He loved her Germanness, her Germanity he’d once called it.

‘Hans Castorp is reading these heavy tomes, I forget why. I do remember his cousin, what’s his name? Never mind. His cousin is puzzled that Hans should have bought all these books when he could have borrowed them, and Hans says, no, we read a book differently when we own it.’

‘True,’ said Paddy.

‘But that’s not what I was thinking about just now. Mann writes this beautiful description of Hans reading with a book on his stomach, that’s what looking at you made me think of. The book it’s so heavy he’s not breathing properly, and he reads to the bottom of the page, very slowly, until his chin is resting on his chest. His head following the lines down until the bottom. Donk. Then his eyes close. He’s asleep. Wonderful.’

Paddy said, ‘A book can knock you out, that’s for sure.’ He was very tempted to go down to the office and find his copy of The Magic Mons, the English translation. He was still reading Emily Bishop’s poems, which he kept beside the bed. ‘Questions of Travel’ was presently under his thumb. Should we have stayed at home, line-break, wherever that may be. Occasionally he read something aloud to Helena. Gradually self-consciousness evaporated. True even of poetry. He read five poems per night. He’d noticed a mania for numbers. At the supermarket he bought packs of things in threes, or three of things they needed. Three toilet rolls! Chorizo sausages came in a three-pack. He saw it when he got home and unpacked. There wasn’t a magic number, simply a repeating one.