Authors: Margaret Drabble
Bessie engrossed herself in a story of eccentric but charming Bohemians, village witchcraft, and murders masterminded from vested interests overseas. Bessie solved the ancient runic riddle engraved on the old wellhead in no time. She was good at crossword puzzles.
Up in Breaseborough, Ellen Cudworth Bawtry was gasping for breath. She was about to have what Dora called ‘a do’. Dora, watching helplessly, could only say, ‘Bessie’s coming, Mother. Bessie’s on her way. She’ll be here soon, Mother. Hang on for Bessie.’
Bessie was miles away, her eyes on the page, her drugged imagination in a Suffolk village drinking vintage port with a satanic vicar, as the dull Midlands flowed past her streaked window.
Ellen hung on for Bessie.
Bessie put away her book, and got off the train at Northam Station, and changed for the branch line. She began to feel worse as she drew nearer home. The familiar ugliness which she had tried so hard to forget closed in again upon her—the dark weeping slabs of railway cuttings, the pitheads, the cooling stations, the terraced houses marching in formation up the hillsides, the dirty washing hanging on dirty lines. It was dangerous to come back. Bad things awaited her. Bessie Barron got out at Breaseborough and looked for a taxi. There was no taxi. She decided to walk. It was not far to Slotton Road, and her overnight case was not heavy.
She walked carefully, upon the uneven pavements, up the hill, to Slotton Road. She too was now breathing heavily, from emotion and unaccustomed exertion. The hill was longer than it had been when she was a girl. She wished not to be here. She felt that at any moment a hand could rise from the cracks in the paving stones and grab her by the ankle and pull her under, into the hollowness beneath. It had waited for her to come back. It had been futile to try to get away.
She tried to walk quicker, but her ankles were swelling under her own weight. She was no longer the willowy blond girl who had trodden lightly on the asphalt. She was a Surrey matron, and the mother of two. They could not force her to come back, they could not entomb her here. But if they did get her now, she’d be too slow to run away.
Bessie made it to Slotton Road, and rang the bell. Dora, long-suffering Dora, shook her head, looking solid and grim. It couldn’t be much longer now, whispered Dora, with glum importance. It was clear that she was willing to yield authority to Bessie at once. Bessie would know what to do.
Slowly Bessie mounted the mean and narrow staircase. It seemed shorter but steeper than it used to be. She paused for breath on the seventh step. The walk from the station had knocked her out. Joe was always trying to persuade her to take more exercise, but she paid no attention to his advice, and made no connection with it now as she puffed, waited, then lugged herself onwards and upwards.
Ellen lay in the bed in which Bessie had been born, in which Bessie had nearly died of influenza. Now Ellen was dying in it. She had never had a good complexion, and had turned a sullen yellow. She had lost much of her considerable weight, and her heavy jowls sagged loosely. She was wearing a bedjacket over her nightdress. At least it looked clean. Bessie noted that Dora had made an effort.
Bessie did not kiss her mother in greeting, The Bawtrys did not hold with kissing. She sat down, heavily, on the chair by the bed, and said, ‘Well, I’ve come, Mother.’
Ellen ceded nothing. ‘Yes,’ was all she said.
And there they sat, mother and daughter, looking at one another. There was nothing to be said. The silence was stiff and solid. Thousands of years of silence lay banked up behind them, lay coldly between them. There were no words. It was as though language had not been invented. Neither would cede, neither would give. What would happen? Ellen did the one thing left to her. She began to cough.
Dora, listening from the bottom of the stairs, was relieved to hear this familiar, ghastly, wrenching sound. At least Bessie would know now she hadn’t wasted her journey. And Bessie, staring at her mother, was thinking the same thing. At least she hadn’t wasted her train fare. This was the end.
Mother and daughters found nothing to say to one another, but sisters Bessie and Dora on that portentous evening recovered some of the old intimacy of childhood. Bessie decided to stay the night with Dora in the old twin room. Slotton Road was slightly to be preferred to Swinton Road. And they both thought Ellen would die in the night.
They sat up late, the pair of them, listening for sounds from upstairs, listening to the ticking of the grandfather clock. Ellen’s thin old tortoiseshell cat, Tibby, sat on Bessie’s knee and purred. Tibby was the last of a dynasty of Bawtry cats. Her great-great-grandmother’s grandmother had been rescued from the Destructor long ago, and cat after cat had slept on the couch, and eaten scraps from the same earthenware dish, and kept the mice away. Tibby would find a good home in Swinton Road with Dora. Tibby, like her mistress, would not live long. Bessie stroked Tibby, and Dora worked at her crochet, and in low voices the sisters spoke of their childhood, of earlier cats, of the motorbike and sidecar, of their pet rabbits Nancy and Peter who had ended up in a pie. Bert and Ellen had not been forgiven for that treachery. Childish grievances were rehearsed. No, she had not been very gentle with them, that old woman upstairs. She had not been a motherly mother.
Towards midnight, Bessie asked Dora if she knew what kind of contraception their parents might have used. Dora was shocked and flattered by this question. She didn’t know the answer. It was hard to associate Ellen Bawtry with Marie Stopes. They must have used something, said Bessie.
At one in the morning, the fat middle-aged daughters took themselves to bed. Bessie settled herself in first, and was reading her Margery Allingham when Dora, in her pyjamas, came to join her. They lay there, companionably. Bessie read for a while, then turned off her light and grunted good night. Dora lay awake for a long time, listening.
Ellen did not die that night, or the next night. On Thursday she seemed, if anything, slightly better, and had managed to have a brief conversation with Bessie about her family and the inferiority of Bessie’s fishmonger’s cod. Surrey cod was not as good as Yorkshire cod, and the price was shocking.
Ellen gave no sign that she knew her end was approaching, or that Bessie’s presence was unusual.
On Friday, Ellen was still, stubbornly, alive, and over her morning toast Bessie announced to Dora that she would go home that afternoon. Her family needed her. On Saturday they were to drive westward from Surrey to Lyme Regis. Everything was settled. It could not be altered now. Everything was planned. They had an AA route map. Joe, Robert and Chrissie must not be disappointed. They could not go without her. They would not understand about towels and bed linen.
(Robert and Chrissie, now nineteen and sixteen, had mixed feelings about this family holiday. But tradition was tradition, and it was still the 1950s.)
Dora accepted Bessie’s decision meekly. Of course Bessie’s plans must have priority. Family life took precedence over single-daughter life, middle-class Surrey life over Breaseborough life. If Dora had hoped to have company to see her through the last spasm of death, she did not show it. It was good of Bessie to have come all this way. It wasn’t anyone’s fault that Ellen had missed her cue. It couldn’t be helped.
We must not give the impression that Bessie valued a family holiday above her mother’s life. She did not prefer the seaside to a deathbed, or pleasure to pain. That was not the kind of person she was. But she had made plans, and she would stick to them. Rigidity, not selfishness, by now ruled her life. Dora understood this, and knew she could not argue with it. Ellen, had she been in a fit condition, would have understood it too. Ellen would have approved of Bessie’s decision. She would have done the same herself. Maybe she had done the same herself.
So Bessie said good-bye to her mother, and promised to come again soon. Her mother glared at her from rheumy bloodshot eyes. She was heard by both daughters to mutter, ‘That’s a likely story,’ though neither of them ever admitted that they had heard these words, so they lack confirmation. Maybe they misheard? But those were what Ellen’s last words to her elder daughter were thought to have been.
On the train on the way down, Bessie could not settle to her novels, or to the stories of the man-eating tigers of Kumaon. The binding of the tiger book was in very poor condition: it looked as though somebody had dropped it in the bath. She must get Chrissie to make it clear, when she took it back, that it hadn’t been her.
Bessie gazed out of the window and felt a slurry of misery rising in her. The self-pity of childhood possessed her. It had all been too difficult, the odds against her had been too high, she had been defeated.
She couldn’t afford to think like this. She started to count her assets as the train approached Derby. One husband, a loyal, successful, patient professional man. Two children, one of either sex, and in the right order. A large detached house with grounds. A good summer coat, in one of the new cotton blends, a decent pair of well-polished shoes and a tidy hat. She wasn’t sure about the hat, but she was even less sure about her short-cropped, unpermed hair, although Monsieur Claude assured her each month that the cut suited her and that she looked delightful. The hat had a good label, so it couldn’t be very wrong, could it? A decent handbag, neither new nor old. And back at the big house in Surrey, at the house called Woodlawn, she had a fine pedigree cat called Smollett, a much finer cat than poor plebeian old Tibby.
The thought of her Smollett asset amused Bessie, and she was almost smiling to herself as the train pulled in at Derby. There she was joined in her hitherto empty compartment by an elderly female traveller. This person endeared herself to Bessie by getting into a muddle about her ticket, her luggage and her destination. Bessie was able to put her right on all points, and over the next hour or so proceeded to tell her all about her prospective holiday, about Lyme Regis, about the cottage the Barrons had rented, about the sea view, the bedroom and bathroom facilities, the brand name of the electric oven. Bessie preferred gas, but she could manage with the electric, she assured her grey-haired companion. Dutifully, the person asked about Bessie’s family, and received rather more information than most people would have wanted. She heard a good deal about my husband the barrister, who had taken silk last year, and about my son who was off to do his National Service, and my daughter who was doing her A-levels at Farnleigh Grammar School. She was subjected to a long analysis of the differences between Holderfield High and Farnleigh Grammar, and of daughter Christine’s ability to do well under either regime. No allusion at all was made to the fact that Bessie’s mother Ellen was in her deathbed in Breaseborough. There was no place for Ellen in this discourse. The stone was rolled against the door of the tomb, and she would not be allowed out anymore.
Leicester passed, and Luton. No other passenger entered the compartment to disrupt this flow of self-protecting self-congratulatory family description. Bessie had mastered the art of the uninterrupted monologue. She did not like talking to those she considered her equals, but she was very good at addressing the butcher, the baker or the woman in haberdashery in John Lewis’s. She would talk to people at bus stops and on buses. She would talk for hours to strangers. The person in the railway compartment listened, politely, as though mesmerized, and at first made no effort to offer any information of her own. Bessie often had this effect on strangers. They tended to accept her at her own valuation. It was less trouble that way.
South of Luton, Bessie at last faltered, and the person from Derby tentatively murmured that she herself was going to Bexhill, to see her sister. Bessie nodded, rather severely. She clearly did not think much of Bexhill. The person, perhaps discouraged, fell silent.
‘Of course Lyme Regis,’ continued Bessie, as though the Bexhill card had never been played, ‘was where Jane Austen set part of
Persuasion.’
It was in some indefinable way clear from her tone that she did not expect the person to recognize this literary allusion, but that she nevertheless could not resist making it. ‘And,’ Bessie went on, importantly, with that rising inflection that prevents interjection, ‘there are many fossils.’
‘Yes,’ said the harmless old lady from Derby, goaded into response. ‘Yes, I know. Isn’t that where that young woman found that ichthyosaurus? What was her name? Mary Anning, if I remember rightly.’
Chrissie and Robert, who had sat with embarrassment through many such monologues, would have congratulated the person from Derby, had they ever learned of this interchange. Not many scored so well. And yet Chrissie and Robert were, in general, sorry for their mother. They recognized that it was her insecurity and her unhappiness that made her talk so much. They were old enough to know this, but not old enough to know what to do about it. They could not make things easier for Bessie. They had to watch and suffer for her and for themselves in silence. They worried about her, in their way.
Walking together along the Cobb at Lyme on a clear calm evening, they discussed their mother, as Bessie and Dora had discussed theirs. They had endured the increasingly neurotic and overorganized ordeal of holiday departure (never again, resolved Robert, never again, swore Chrissie), and now were after all quite pleased to find themselves in this beautiful curving town by the curving bay of the southern sea. Lyme was romantic. Lyme was in good taste, and had not in those days taken on the powerful British seaside odour of onion, vinegar, ketchup and fried foodstuffs. It still smelled of sand, salt, sea and fish. They liked Lyme Regis. They were young, and they were still hopeful.
‘She says she’s depressed,’ said Chrissie.
‘Depressed? What’s she got to be depressed about?’ said Robert.
‘It doesn’t work like that,’ said Chrissie. ‘She says it’s something called endogenous depression. It’s an illness, she says. Like mumps or measles. That’s what she says Dr Hancox says.’ Robert didn’t bother to reply. He knew it didn’t work like that.