Strangers (41 page)

‘I’ll be home within forty-eight hours,’ Phillip said.

Tibby lay in her hospice room, surrounded by flowers that Annie brought in from her garden.

‘There must be a fine show this year,’ she said politely, when Annie had arranged them.

Annie sat by the bed, watching her mother’s transparent face. Tibby was usually awake, but she rarely spoke. When she did speak, it was about small things; the doctors or one of the other patients, or the food they brought her that she couldn’t eat. She didn’t even talk about her grandchildren any more. Annie knew that her mother’s world had shrunk to the dimensions of her hospital bed.

It was hard for Tibby to be dignified under such circumstances, even though the staff who looked after her did all that was possible to control her pain. But she clung tenaciously to the silence that she had maintained about her illness. She didn’t talk any more about getting better, but she wouldn’t admit the fact of approaching death either. In the beginning Annie had seen the refusal as a kind of graceful courage. But as the months had passed her frustration had grown. She felt the silence now like a cold glass wall between her mother and herself.

She reached for Tibby’s hand and held it. It felt as dry and weightless as a dead leaf. As she sat in the quiet, flower-scented room Annie was realizing that she didn’t want her mother to die without acknowledging the truth, even if it was only by a word. As if to acknowledge it would be to tell her daughter,
It’s all right. I know what’s happening to me. I can bear it, and so can you
.

I’m just like Benjy and Tom, Annie thought. I want my mother’s reassurance, even now that she’s dying.

Love, dues. The ribbons of continuity, again and again.

Annie glanced up and saw that Tibby was looking sideways at her. Her glance was clear, appraising, full of her mother’s own intelligence and understanding.

Annie thought briefly,
At last
.

But then Tibby’s head fell back against her pillows. ‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll go to sleep now, darling.’

Annie stood up and leant over to kiss her cheek. ‘I’ll come in again at the same time tomorrow,’ she promised, as she always did.

Phillip arrived thirty-six hours later. Annie met him at Heathrow, and drove him straight to the hospice.

‘They don’t know how much longer,’ she told him. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Phil.’

She glanced at him as she drove. Phillip was fair, like her, but he was losing his hair and his skin was reddened by the sun. He looked exactly what he was, a successful engineer just back from overseas. Annie and her brother had never been close, even as children. Phillip had always been the brisk, practical one, while Annie was slow and dreamy. He had been his father’s son, always, while Annie and her mother had shared a friendship, she understood now, that had its roots in their strong similarity.

But she was genuinely glad and relieved to see Phillip now. She felt some of the weight of her anxiety shifting on to the shoulders of his lightweight suit.

The family bond, she thought wryly. Always there.

When she stopped at a red light Phillip put his arm round her.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t been here. Are you all right, Anne? You don’t look as though you’ve recovered properly yourself.’

The car rolled forward again.

‘How could you be here? There would have been nothing you could do, anyway. And I’m fine, thanks.’

‘It hasn’t been much of a year for you, has it?’

Annie watched the road intently. ‘It has had its ups and downs.’

There was nothing else she could say to Phillip, however searchingly he stared at her. Not to this broad, red-faced man who had stepped briefly out of an unknown world, even if he was her brother.

They reached the hospice, and went upstairs to Tibby’s room. Jim had been sitting by her bed, and he stood up now and hugged his son. Tibby opened her eyes.

‘Hello, Mum,’ Phillip said. ‘I’ve got some leave, so here I am.’

Tibby looked at him, unmoving. For an instant Annie glimpsed the same clear awareness in her face, and it heartened her. Then her mother smiled faintly, and lifted her shrunken hand.

‘Hello, darling. Come and sit here by me.’

Annie watched Phillip sit down, and take hold of Tibby’s hand.

Her sense of relief intensified, making her feel light, almost weightless. Of course Tibby knew that she was dying. Her way of confronting it was natural, for Tibby. Admiration of her mother’s bravery blazed up inside Annie.

‘I’ll call in later,’ she whispered, and she left Tibby with her husband and son.

It was early evening when she drove back again and the houses and shops and parks glowed in the rich, buttery sunlight. Annie parked her car in the hospice visitors’ park and walked up the steps past tubs of shimmering violet and blue and white petunias.

Tibby’s room was shadowy behind drawn curtains. Annie thought at first that her mother was asleep, but she turned her head at the click of the door.

‘Did I wake you?’ Annie murmured.

Tibby shook her head. ‘No. I was thinking. Remembering things. I’m very good at remembering now. All kinds of things that I thought I had forgotten for ever.’

Annie smiled at her. She knew just how it was. The fragments of confetti, precious fragments.

‘Shall I open the curtains a little?’ she asked. ‘The light outside is beautiful.’

Tibby shook her head. ‘It’s comfortable like this.’

Tibby didn’t want to see the light any more, Annie knew that. Her world had shrunk to the bed, and the faces around it. She nodded, with the tears behind her eyes, and for a moment they were quiet in the dim room.

Then Tibby said, ‘Thank you for calling Phillip home.’ Her eyes had been half-closed but they opened wide now, piercing Annie. ‘I know what it means.’ She smiled, and then she added, as if Annie were a child again, and she was comforting her after a childish misunderstanding, very softly, ‘It’s all right.’

The mixture of pain, and relief, and love that flooded through Annie was almost too much for her. She sat with her head bent, holding Tibby’s hand folded between her own. They were silent again. Annie thought that Tibby was pursuing her own memories, piecing together the confetti pictures as she had done herself with Steve.

But Tibby said suddenly, in a clear voice that startled her, ‘Is it something between you and Martin? Is that why you are unhappy?’

Denials, placatory phrases and soothing half-truths followed one another through Annie’s mind. She had opened her mouth to say,
Of course not, we’re very happy
, but she raised her head and met her mother’s eyes.

I was the one who wanted the truth, she thought.

‘I fell in love with someone else,’ she said simply. ‘A stranger.’

‘When?’

‘After the bomb. We were there together.’

Tibby nodded. ‘I guessed that,’ she said. The maternal intuition took Annie back to girlhood all over again. She tightened her fingers on her mother’s.
Don’t go, Tibby. I’ll miss you too much
.

‘What are you going to do?’

Annie looked at her hopelessly. ‘Nothing. What is there to do?’

Suddenly she could see how bright Tibby’s eyes were in the dimness. The corners of her mouth drew down, an economical gesture of impatience, disappointment, all that she had the strength for. Annie knew that she had given the wrong answer.

There was a long, long pause before Tibby spoke again. ‘I did nothing,’ she said. ‘Don’t make the same mistakes.
Don’t
.’ The last word was no more than a soft, exhaled breath. The confession hurt her. Tibby closed her eyes, exhausted.

Annie saw it all, the sharp outlines of the story, even though she would never know the details. Tibby and Jim had failed each other somehow, in the course of the years. Perhaps there had been another man. Perhaps a path of a different kind had offered itself. Annie remembered her mother’s wedding picture, with Tibby in her little tilted hat, her lips vividly painted. Whatever had happened, the two of them had stayed together. For her own sake, perhaps, and Phillip’s. Tibby had taken on the protection of the house and the big corner garden, and Jim the routines that commanded his days.

Annie felt the sadness of it, drifting and settling, as silent and as endless as the dust on her mother’s furniture. What reason was there?

Don’t make the same mistakes
.

But no one’s mistakes could be the same. They were all different, and the permutations of their mistakes stretched on into infinity.

Annie lifted her mother’s hand, feeling the bones move under the skin. Some things were right. So many of Tibby’s. Those were the ones to hold on to.

‘You’ve got us,’ she whispered. ‘I love you, Tibby.’

Tibby smiled, without opening her eyes. Her head was heavy against the pillow.

‘I know,’ she said.

Annie stayed with her until she was sure that she was asleep. Then she laid her hand gently back on the covers and went out into the light again. The brightness made her blink and she stood for a moment on the steps, watching the intensity of it on the frilled trumpets of the petunias. Then Annie climbed into her car and drove back through the streets to Martin, and the boys who were waiting for her under the rucked-up shelter of their bedcovers.

Tibby died the same night, peacefully, in her sleep.

She left no will, other than the joint one she had drawn up with her husband years ago, for Annie and Phillip’s benefit. There were no instructions about her funeral. Annie was sure that her mother would have preferred to be buried, but she said nothing when Jim and Phillip agreed on cremation.

‘That seems sensible,’ Phillip said briskly and Annie had turned away with her grief, unable to comprehend how anything connected with her mother’s death could be described as sensible.

The arrangements were made, and Tibby was cremated after a brief service in an ugly, modern chapel. The curtains that parted for the coffin to glide through reminded Annie of the thick velvet ones at a pantomime. She wanted to laugh, and cry, but she went on standing stiffly beside Martin and the organ played treacly music over their heads.

Afterwards, they filed out into the overpowering sunshine.

With Jim and Phillip, Annie had made arrangements for Tibby’s family and friends to come back to the old house after the ceremony. Looking backwards, Annie saw the little line of cars draw out after Martin’s. The sun glinted cheerfully off chrome and glass, sharp in her eyes, until she turned her head again. Jim sat in the front of the car with Martin, and Phillip was beside Annie. She felt the vacuum that Tibby had left so profoundly that she wanted to shout out, ‘Wait! We’ve left her behind. Turn round, Martin.’

When they reached the house Martin parked a little way from it to make space for the following cars. In a sombre line the four of them walked towards the gate. As they reached it Jim looked up at the gables of the house.

‘I’m going to put it on the market,’ he said.

The green-painted gate swung inwards, with the same creak that had welcomed Annie home from school.

‘Probably the best thing,’ Phillip said. ‘It’s far too big, now.’

They went on towards the front door, but Annie stood still. Behind her she could hear the other cars drawing up, and muted, respectful voices. She looked at the front door-knocker that Tibby used to brass-polish, and at the windows, veiled with midsummer dust now, that she used to insist on cleaning herself.

It’s only a house
, she thought.

But it was more, too. It was Tibby’s elaborate, respectable shrine to a family life that had long ago ebbed out of it. It was, in the end, her reason for being, and now it would be sold and the new owners would smile at the outmoded décor. As she had known that they would. As she stood in the sunshine amidst the scent of roses Annie felt the lustreless pall of compromise and disappointment, her own as well as her parents’, heavy around her.

Martin had waited at the gate, and now he came and put his hand under her arm. ‘It isn’t the same house without Tibby,’ he tried to comfort her.

‘I know,’ Annie said. After a moment she whispered, ‘It’s a waste, isn’t it? A terrible waste.’

They went on inside.

Annie did what was expected of her, just as her mother would have done. She greeted her mother’s friends, and exchanged sympathies with them. She made sure that they were helped to food from the cold buffet, and she poured out glasses of white wine and handed them around. And then, when there was a brief lull, she went up the stairs to her mother’s old bedroom.

She sat down on her bed, and the smooth, pale expanse of the bedcover crumpled up at once beneath her. Annie stood up again and went to the wardrobe, opening the mirrored doors to look in at her mother’s clothes, neatly lined up on their padded hangers. She turned again and went to the dressing table, where Tibby’s old-fashioned glass scent bottles with their braid-covered rubber bulbs stood in exact shining circles in the film of dust.

As she looked down at the rings the voice, insistent in Annie’s head, grew louder and louder. Suddenly, it took possession of her.

Steve. Steve
.

She put the scent bottle down and went to the telephone that stood on the table beside Tibby’s bed. She dialled his number and listened to the message once more and the warmth that he had stirred in her leapt up all over again. This time, she left her own message.

It was earlier than his usual time when Steve reached home. He had endured a lunch with an agency man he detested, and he had drunk twice as much as he wanted in order to pass the time. He had sat through a meeting afterwards in a stuffy room while the sun edged past the blinds, and the day had left him with a dull headache and a sour, metallic taste in his mouth.

The flat looked bare and neglected when he came in. He dropped his jacket in a heap on the black sofa and went into the kitchen to make himself another drink. Then, with the full whisky tumbler in his hand, he came back to his desk and flipped the keys on the answering machine.

It was there.