The Enemy of the Good (32 page)

‘It won’t be long now, please God!’

‘How long is long? Every minute is a lifetime for him.’

She made no answer, acutely aware that, for all her pledges to stand by Edwin, she had failed him at the critical moment. She trusted he would understand, having understood her so well for fifty years, that she had to look to the future: not just to her own need for the child but to the child’s need for her, as it struggled to find a place in a world that worshipped perfection.

‘I’ll take care of everything, Ma. All I want from you is your blessing. If what’s holding you back is a fear of antagonising Shoana, don’t worry! There’s no reason for her ever to find out. Why not take a break? Stay with a friend for a few days? You’re wiped out. No one would blame you.’

‘Except myself! How can I abandon your father now, when he needs me more than ever?’

‘No. What he needs is what you won’t give him.’

‘You say that, but how can you be sure?’

‘Ma please! Must we go through all this again?’

‘Yes!’ she said, startled by her own vehemence. ‘And again and again and again. This isn’t some old sofa we’re throwing out. It’s your father. My husband. My life.’

‘And his life, Ma? Doesn’t that count for anything?’

‘I should be with him. If we do it, I should be here to hold his hand.’

‘That’s fine by me, but what about Shoana?’

‘We could keep it from her for a day or two. I could stay with him – with you – and then leave… Oh, I can’t believe we’re sitting here, discussing it in such a cold-blooded way!’

‘It won’t work, Ma. What about Linda and Ruth and Mr and Mrs
Shepherd
? Are they all to be sworn to secrecy? Then there’s the death certificate…’

‘Please! I can’t think straight.’

‘Then let someone else do the thinking for a change. I know how much it hurts, but what difference can one night make after fifty odd years?’

‘More than you’ll ever know.’

‘Besides how would he recognise you? He’s buried somewhere deep inside himself.’

His heartfelt conviction swayed her. He was right about Edwin’s wishes. She had no ethical objections to them, only gut fears. Whatever the pain of deserting his deathbed, it was nothing to that of letting him linger on in misery. Dying was not always as clear-cut as it was on a certificate. For weeks she had been a widow in all but name.

‘You’re right, darling, thank you. Thank you for your clarity and for your patience. I know I’ve only made things harder with all my niggling, selfish doubts. You have my blessing – of course you do – along with my gratitude. I’ll go away. Yes, I shall invite myself to stay with Valerie Sinclair. She’s been begging me to go down for too long.’

For all their sakes, they agreed that the visit should take place right away. So, quitting the warmth of the hearthrug, she went to her study to phone Valerie, whose panic at the lack of notice threatened to wreck the entire plan. A gentle reminder of their scratch suppers in the Serengeti reassured her, and Marta arranged to take the train to Lewes the following day. Determined to spend the final night with Edwin, she pulled up a chair beside his bed, leant back on a mound of pillows, and peered into his empty eyes.

Contemplating a face that was a palimpsest of her past half century, she found herself transported back to an Oxford lecture hall where they sat side by side for a talk on comparative – or, as it was then,
primitive
– religion.
Gathering
up his notes at the end, he pocketed her fountain pen: unwittingly it had seemed at the time, but, weighing up her memories, she wondered whether to credit him with more guile. Eager to atone, he invited her, first, to tea in his rooms and, then, to a punt on the Cherwell. All his diffidence disappeared the moment he picked up the pole. It was evident that he had done his homework when he apologised for reading theology.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Didn’t the rabbis at Auschwitz put God on trial for crimes against humanity?’

‘I’m not a rabbi,’ she said, prompting him to head for the bank, where they exchanged their first kiss. Thirty years later, when he lost his faith in God but elected to stay in the Church, he equated it with the Auschwitz rabbis who, having found God guilty as charged, gazed at the gathering clouds and
prepared
for evening prayer.

While never renouncing the humanist creed of her childhood, she had been grateful for his religious belief and, more specifically, his Anglicanism. Like his Englishness, it stood for the triumph of insularity over experience, a sign that he had remained untainted by the forces that had ravaged her world. Which was why she had been hit so hard by his apostasy. Now she had to take heart from the conviction both that their current goodbye would be final and that releasing him was the ultimate act of love.

After a night which, although sleepless, was strangely restful, she packed a small case and gave instructions to the nurses. At ten thirty, with Mr Shepherd waiting outside, she took a last leave of Edwin. Hoping against hope that he would somehow acknowledge the magnitude of their parting, she was doubly dismayed by his blank expression. She kissed his swollen lips and walked slowly from the room. Meeting Clement in the hall, she drew him aside and, despite her best intentions, demanded further assurances that he knew the optimum dose of morphine to deliver. His melancholy nod dispelled any doubt and she clasped him as tightly as if he were the one about to die. Then, with a quick farewell to Ajax, whose reproachful stare threatened to shatter her resolve, she hurried down the steps and into the car.

‘Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy’ echoed through
Clement’s
head in counterpoint to his sister’s Old Testament injunctions. The more she spoke, the more assured he grew of his position. She denounced him as irreligious, when it was precisely his faith in the afterlife that had allayed any lingering doubts about helping his father. It would be far harder were he
dispatching
him into a void.

Confident of God’s blessing, he was now concerned to obtain his mother’s. Swift action was essential, but her distress at Shoana’s departure forced him to postpone the discussion until dinner. As a declaration of intent, he put on a shirt and tie, finding to his surprise when he entered the drawing room that she had made a similar effort, exchanging her blouse and slacks for a turquoise kaftan. Cheered by the concurrence, he went down to the cellar in search of a good bottle of claret, before grabbing the first that came to hand when the dusty racks brought his father’s death chillingly close.

Either from the excellence of the wine or a determined attempt to blot out the horror on the other side of the wall, they joked their way through the first two courses, but the pudding made them pause.

‘Trifle,’ his mother said. ‘It’s your father’s favourite.’

‘Was,’ he corrected gently.

‘I can’t, Clement,’ she said, in a sudden change of tack. ‘Whatever we may have agreed before, I can’t do it. Your sister would never forgive me.’

‘She need never know.’

‘No? She’ll pick up on the slightest change in his condition. And I can’t lie. Not to Shoana.’

‘So she’ll let Pa suffer to salve her conscience?’ He struggled to excise any note of bitterness from his voice.

‘It won’t be long now, please God!’

‘How long is long? Every minute is a lifetime for him.’

He waited for a reply, but she concentrated on her food. It was outrageous that she should submit to Shoana’s blackmail. He knew how much she longed for a grandchild, but he refused to believe that she would put her own desires before his father’s needs. Torn between tenderness and exasperation, he explained how he would see to everything while she took a well-earned break, ensuring that any suspicions Shoana might have would fall on him alone.

He felt his mother’s anguish, as she agonised over both the plan and its consequences before finally giving her assent. With neither of them wishing to dally at table, they returned to the drawing room to find Mrs Shepherd laying a fire. ‘I thought you needed warming. It’s October,’ she added to avoid confusion. After a few glum words about ‘the Bishop’, whose title she invoked more reverently than ever, she poured their coffee and went out.

‘Now you’ve made up your mind, you should go at once,’ he said, returning to the subject of the visit. ‘Too much anticipation diminishes pleasure.’ What he meant and she knew that he meant and he knew that she knew that he meant – a sequence which could extend as long as a childhood dare – was that it was Thursday night and he needed to attend to everything before Shoana’s Sunday visit. She went out to phone Valerie Sinclair, a Somerville colleague who had accompanied her on one of her later fieldtrips to the Hadza. Valerie, a birdlike woman, whose fondness for white ankle socks had baffled Mark even before he heard her described as a bluestocking, had been vanquished in some faculty dispute and retired in high dudgeon to Sussex, from where she fired off long missives to her friends as if she were back in the bush. As predicted, she was delighted to welcome his mother, who confirmed that she would leave the next morning and, in a rare sign of dependency, asked him to look up the times of the trains. That settled, she announced that she would spend the final night at his father’s bedside, insisting that she had slept in tougher conditions than a wingback chair.

Having made sure that she was as comfortable as could be – his only
practical
contribution being a stack of pillows – he went upstairs to ring home. A momentary panic on reaching the answer-machine was dispelled when Mike cut in to say that he had leapt straight out of the bath. ‘Tell me about your day,’ Clement charged, eager to hold on to the tantalising image for as long as possible. Mike obliged with a wry account of teaching the history of slavery to an ethnically diverse class of fourteen-year-olds, who regarded him as one of the oppressors.

Mike then asked about his father and he explained that he was going ahead with the plan. ‘Would you like me to come down?’ Mike asked. ‘Given the way the Head’s pussyfooting around me, I suspect he’d allow me the day off to floss my teeth!’

‘No, I’d rather be on my own. If anything should go wrong – ’

‘You said it was foolproof!’

‘So it is. But there’s always an
if
and I don’t want you to be implicated… involved.’

‘I hate to think of you having to manage on your own.’

‘I won’t be. You’ll say I’m imagining it, but I feel – I can’t ever remember feeling it so strongly – Mark’s presence all around.’

‘My eternal rival,’ Mike said enigmatically.

‘He would have done it. No question.’

‘You do know exactly what to do?’

‘You sound like my mama,’ Clement replied, finding that even that failed to silence him. So he described how he had consulted their GP friend, Jimmy Naismith, who had outlined an infallible procedure. A slight twist of the dial on his father’s morphine pump would turn a palliative into a lethal dose.

‘I’m proud of you, Clem,’ Mike said, leaving him tempted to change his mind and ask him down, less for moral than for emotional support. He yearned for the warmth of his mouth, the touch of his skin, the vigour of his flesh thrusting into him. He had kept him at bay for too long, blaming the effect of the drugs on his libido, when the truth lay in the effect of the virus on his psyche. Fearing, however, that Mike’s presence would be a distraction, he resolved to stand firm. So, after telling him he loved him with no ‘You could never love me as much as I love you,’ to protect himself, Clement put down the phone. He washed, changed and slipped into bed, trying to blank out the image of the last vigil in the room below. Then, remembering his pills, he jumped up and dashed to the basin.

The next morning he ate an early breakfast and went for a walk in the woods, in part, as he told Mrs Shepherd, to clear his head, but in the main to avoid his mother. Refreshed, he stole back into the house by the kitchen stairs, venturing down to the hall only when his regular checks at the
bathroom
window showed that Mr Shepherd had driven round to the front. He was relieved to see, from her coat and case, that his mother had not lost heart and, from her relaxed expression, that she had managed to sleep.

‘No, not a wink,’ she replied when he asked her. ‘I remembered, which was far more restful.’ Then, moving so close to him that their cheeks brushed, she whispered tentatively: ‘You’re quite sure of the dose?’

Her question offended him. Rather than risk an answer, he made do with a slight nod. When he looked up, he found that his eyes had filled with tears.

He carried her case down the steps, waiting while she said goodbye to Mrs Shepherd and Ruth and stroked Ajax’s muzzle. As they in turn watched him kiss her, he entreated her loudly to have a complete rest. ‘Promise me you won’t worry about Pa. We’ll look after him.’ Then abandoning all restraint, he added: ‘He’ll still be here when you get back,’ at which she pulled away and climbed into the car, saying something to Mr Shepherd which sent them speeding down the drive.

He returned indoors, following Ruth into the morning room where she was preparing to give his father a bed-bath. ‘Poor man,’ she said, gazing down at the living effigy. ‘All this must be specially hard for someone like him. The other day Linda and I were changing him and he looked at me and went “Shi….” Well, we thought it was
number twos
; you know how they speak their minds when they get to this stage.’ Clement grimaced. ‘So we winched him up, but he wouldn’t do anything. “Naughty boy!” I said, only joking you understand. It wasn’t until we winched him down, that Linda noticed my brooch. It was a sheep.’

Had Clement felt any qualms about his plan, they would have been
banished
by Ruth’s story. Rather than skulk about the house, he strolled into the village, where the general concern about his father’s health and the occasional wary inquiry about his own led him to beat a rapid retreat. He walked back via the cottages and, on impulse, called on Karen, whom he found threading beads in a kitchen that reeked of camphor. She announced that she and her coven were ‘delivering charges for Uncle Edwin’s recovery’. He felt a twinge of unease and, refusing a mug of nettle tea, returned home. Suddenly shy of sitting in rooms so redolent of his father, he went upstairs until dinner, after which he told Ruth that, like his mother, he would spend the night in the morning room.

‘Any more of this and you’ll be docking my wages!’

‘I wouldn’t think of it!’

‘I was having you on. Besides, I’m on contract,’ she said, as though anything less would demean her.

After Ruth’s departure, he sat studying his father’s face, making a conscious effort to memorise features he would never forget, when he was seized by a profound urge to sketch him. He went up to his room and, for the first time in over a year, took out a pad and pencils. The Roxborough disaster had sapped both his confidence and his will. On his way to the studio the following week he had thrown up in the corridor, assuring an anxious neighbour that it was caused by the lingering fumes of resin. Subsequent visits confirmed his
revulsion
. He had aimed to assist devotion and to provoke debate, not to put one man in hospital and another behind bars. Yet he refused to compromise by settling for mere technical facility. If the truth were so dangerous, the only honest course was silence.

Immediately, all his uncertainty and self-disgust dissolved. It was as though the decision to act had reached to his very core and reignited his creativity. He returned to the morning room, determined to preserve his father’s features on paper even as he was releasing him from the world. Despite his lack of practice, the line flowed freely and he was filled with a deep sense of peace. He knew then that it was time, and he leant forward to whisper his intentions in his father’s ear, triggering a slight shift in his breathing, which he took for a sigh of approval, and a gentle moistening of his eyes. At a stroke, his father shed fifty years, his hair turned raven and his skin olive, and he found himself staring at Rafik. He shrank back in horror before realising that it was another sign. At long last he had taken control.

With infinite care, as though adjusting the needle in his father’s arm rather than the dial on his pump, he increased the flow of morphine, flooding his body with life-giving death. The long-case clock in the hall struck twelve, as if to signal the approach of sleep. He sat back to keep vigil but, once again, the artist in him prevailed and he picked up his pad and pencil, determined to capture his father’s final hours. Never before had he felt so sure of himself: that the rightness of his actions was untainted even by the desire to see himself in the right. Honouring his father in the way he knew best, he focused intently on the tranquil face, until grief threatened to turn the drawing into an aquarelle.

It was a token of his father’s great spirit that it should leave his body with so little fuss. There was no death rattle, not even a rasp, just a slow withdrawal until what had been passive became inert. The transition was at once
imperceptible
and pronounced. Gazing at the unchanged features, Clement
recognised
that the one irreversible change had taken place. He kept hold of his father’s hand, refusing to let it go even to check the pulse. He resolved against waking the household, not to arrogate the moment to himself but to allow his father to rest in peace. Besides, it felt more fitting to inform people at the start of a new day. So for three hours he sat by the bed, barely stirring, until he heard the clock strike seven. Recalling his father’s insistence on winding it himself, he was gripped by a searing sense of loss. Hot tears streamed down his cheeks and he laid his head on the hollow chest, howling into the blanket. Then, drying his eyes, he stood up with a cramp and hobbled to the door, before remembering to reset the pump.

His first stop was the kitchen where Mrs Shepherd was frying bacon for her husband’s breakfast. He was startled by her extreme response to news that she must have long expected. As she clung to a chair, body slumped and face drenched with tears, he was seized by the notion that her relationship with his father might have been more than it seemed. He steeled himself for a lachrymose confession, complete with pleas for the family’s forgiveness, only to despair of his soap-opera sensibilities when she paid tribute to ‘the finest gentleman anyone could ever hope to meet’. So fierce was her sorrow that she made no acknowledgement of his, a glancing reference to ‘your poor mother’ being her sole recognition of those higher up the hierarchy of loss. She sat, wrapped in her memories, until, passing over the apostasy that had caused her so much pain, she comforted herself with the assertion that he had ‘gone to a better place’.

Leaving her to break the news to her husband, he went up to the parlour to intercept Linda before she began her shift. He was glad that it was her rather than Ruth, since the laxness that had irritated him in the past made her less likely to notice any anomalies in the drip. Far from being suspicious, she wasn’t even surprised. ‘I could see it was his time to go. What a blessing you were with him! Too often it’s only one of us.’

‘I’m sure you do all you can.’

‘Oh don’t get me wrong. I count it a privilege. A true privilege. When people ask me how I bear it, I tell them I wouldn’t swap places with any midwife. Did you notice a change in the air? A sort of fluttering?’

‘I must have nodded off,’ he replied and hurried upstairs to ring his mother. His bystander’s account, a safeguard against eavesdroppers, added to the sense of unreality. His mother showed no such concern, replying with a muted ‘Thank you,’ that fed his paranoia.