Authors: Margaret Drabble
All this was ominously out of character. Chrissie could not help recalling Auntie Dora’s description of Grandma Bawtry’s death, the death which Bessie had managed to avoid by escaping to Lyme Regis. According to Auntie Dora, the night that Grandma died, she had said to her daughter Dora, ‘Thank you, Dora, for all you’ve done.’ Chrissie never knew whether these words had really been spoken, or whether Auntie Dora had invented them on Grandma’s behalf. It was impossible to tell, from Dora’s narrative style, and there had been no witnesses.
Chrissie Sinclair need not have worried about how to amuse her mother in New York. For Bessie Barron refused to set foot in the New World. On the penultimate night of the crossing, she undressed, and took a bath, and brushed her teeth, and brushed her hair, and applied face cream to the soft folds of her face. She put herself to bed, and sat herself up against a heap of pillows, and reached for her remote control. She switched the television to the channel of grey and white night water that showed the progress of the liner through the ocean. She followed the view of the bridge as it heaved slowly forwards through the sea. New York was within reach, but the
Queen Elizabeth
was in no hurry to arrive there. She was dawdling and losing speed. And Bessie too was beginning to lose speed. She too had no wish to arrive. Ahead lay effort, exhaustion, challenge, confrontation. Here was a quiet, smooth and everlastingly forward motion, into the gunboat greyness of eternity. Bessie Barron did not believe in eternity, but despite her lack of faith in it, it was moving slowly towards her.
She turned down the volume of the repeating track of classical music which accompanied the moving image, and took up her volume of
Washington Square
. She read a few paragraphs of James’s slow and stately prose. There had been times when she would have liked to accompany Daisy Miller to Rome, to walk in the Champs Élysées with a refined and admiring American gentleman, to visit Boston, or to see Washington Square. But now that Washington Square was sailing towards her, she no longer wished to go there. The time for wishing was over.
She laid down her book, and gazed once more at the dull grey screen of night. A spatter of raindrops filmed over the glassy lens. Bessie’s eyes filmed over into unseeing. The digital minutes and the sea miles clicked silently away, smooth, regular, evenly paced, as they closed in on their destination. What was the point of arrival? Arrival was nothing but disappointment and diminution. Arrival would mean trying to please her daughter by trying to look grateful and trying to be good. The time for all of that was past. Arrival was an unnecessary triviality.
Bessie gazed and gazed at the slow and stately image of movement. The heavy vessel cleaved through the dense and heavy water, and she lay in it, warm in her single bed, as in a capsule, as in a chrysalis, a white grub in her girlish white nightdress. She was content. With or without her knowledge, with or without her consent, with or without her effort, she would sail onwards, away from Breaseborough, away from the smoke and the grime and the slag and the crozzle, away from stifling Dora, away from the hot fevered hours of study, away from the condescension of Gertrude Wadsworth and the rationed contempt of Miss Strachey, away from that snub about Mary Anning and the fossil bones. The long-tried patience of Joe Barron, the courtesy of the tradesmen of Surrey, and the lonely evenings with her supper tray fell away in her wake. No more hesitations in the grocery store, no more waiting for the telephone to ring through an empty house. No more surrender to the drug of ringing her poor long-suffering daughter. There would be no more testing and no more failure. She could lie here forever, suspended, waiting for the next phase. It would come to her. Out there, slowly, it would come to be. The pattern would emerge, if only she could cease from all effort. Watchman, what of the night? Joy cometh in the morning.
It was Chrissie who came in the morning, tapping on the door at nine, surprised that her mother had not yet tapped on hers. For in their soothing shipboard routine, each day, Bessie had woken, rung for the early-morning tea on which she had insisted, then had taken her shower, dressed and knocked on Chrissie’s door at a quarter to nine to accompany her to breakfast. But this morning, no knock had summoned Chrissie, nor was there any response when Chrissie went to bang on Bessie’s door. Bessie being dead, there was no answer. Five minutes later, Chrissie tried again. As Bessie was still dead, there was still no answer. Chrissie, alarmed by now, went back to her own cabin and rang her mother’s telephone number and, failing to get a reply, rang for the floor steward, who came round with a key. He unlocked the door, with Chrissie at his elbow, and, as he was later to tell his colleagues, he realized at once that the old lady was dead, though he couldn’t have said why he was so sure. For Bessie Barron was lying quite restfully, on her back, her eyes politely shut, her head centred on the pillow, for all the world as though she were sleeping. Her book lay open, face down, on the bed, with her reading glasses by it. The television silently played on.
The steward put out a warning hand to forestall Chrissie, to give him time to inspect the corpse more closely. But Chrissie was close behind and not to be forestalled. They both stood there together and looked down at the body of Bessie Barron.
Bessie’s skin was pale and dry. Otherwise, there was no change in her. There had been no struggle, no fighting for breath. She looked unworn, unused and younger than in life. How could anybody, let alone Bessie Barron, have slipped away with so little fuss?
Chrissie was never able to remember what she and the steward said to one another. She remembered that she had sat down on the bed, and that the steward had rung the number of the ship’s hospital. Then he had offered to go and fetch her a cup of tea and she had said she would rather have coffee. Bessie had died without her last cup of early-morning tea. And the doctor and a paramedic had arrived, and Bessie had been pronounced officially dead. The doctor was very calming, for he was used to this kind of thing, but Chrissie felt that she did not need calming. She was already calm. Soon, she knew, there would be a flurry of activity and anxiety—there would be talk of coffins, certificates, insurance, repatriation of remains. But for the moment everything was very still, as though time had stopped. And Chrissie felt a strange weightlessness, as though the Old Woman of the Sea had been lifted from her shoulders. She breathed the air, and her lungs seemed to fill more deeply. Bessie looked now like a light husk. How could she have weighed so much?
The doctor and the nurse were debating whether to use a stretcher or a wheelchair to take Bessie to the morgue. Would Chrissie like to stay a little while alone with her mother? Chrissie reached out a hand and gently touched Bessie’s hand and said no, she would not.
A stretcher, a wheelchair? What did it matter? A wheelchair would be simpler. No, Chrissie didn’t mind. Bessie wouldn’t have minded, so why should she? Bessie had often said she would be happy to be buried in a bin bag, so she would certainly not have thought a wheelchair irreverent. Telephone calls were made. Coffee was brought. It was understood by all that there was to be no fuss. No wailing, no lying in state. A discreet and veiled departure along the corridor to a service elevator, and so down to the hospital on Six Deck, and into the cooler. These things happened all the time. Sea voyages are the pastime of the elderly, and in the natural way of things the elderly die. There was a well-tried procedure, a fast track for the deceased. Routine took over.
Mrs Barron was to be congratulated, posthumously, on the style of her departure. She had shown excellent manners. She had not choked to death noisily in the restaurant, or suffered a stroke by the fruit machines, or fallen down a stairwell and broken a limb. She had not thrown herself overboard, or drowned in her bath. Such things had happened. Mrs Barron had ceased upon the midnight with no pain. Her passing was to be envied.
Bessie was wheeled away, propped up to look as though she was still alive, and Chrissie was escorted to the telecommunications room to ring home. She rang Donald, who said all the right things and asked all the right questions and said he would fly out at once to meet her at the dock if she wanted him. Was Chrissie all right? Yes, of course she was, she said. She wasn’t even shocked. It had all happened too smoothly for shock. Maybe she would feel shocked soon. But so far, no. So far, so good. They would speak again the next day.
Then she rang Robert in Waterford, where it was by now early afternoon. Bessie had managed to choose a good hour as well as a good death. Robert said dryly, ‘Good God, what a dirty trick to play on you.’ These were his very words. Was Chrissie all right, he also wanted to know. Yes, of course she was, she replied. ‘Well, who would have thought it?’ was Robert’s epitaph upon his mother.
Chrissie was more than all right. She was suffused with an extraordinary sensation of lightness. She sat in her cabin for a while, simply breathing. She had rejected offers of sedatives and tranquillizers. She had no need of pills.
Should she ring Faro? No, she would defer that dangerous pleasure.
Her mother’s heavy body, weightless and shrunken in death, vanished from sight as though it had never been, and Chrissie spent the rest of the day in a dream. It was her last day on board on this voyage of deliverance. She inspected the travel-insurance documents, as she had promised Donald that she would, and noted that the cost of repatriation of remains was covered for a sum of up to six thousand dollars. The doctor had said that would be more than adequate. She paced the sun deck and the boat deck. The sparrow was still perched in the rigging. What had Bessie died of? Chrissie did not really want to know. Her heart had stopped, and that was that. After so many illnesses, feigned and real, she had decided to die. No more would she be able to torment others by saying she wished she was dead. She had her wish.
Chrissie packed her mother’s clothes and possessions neatly into their suitcases. Her outsize underwear, her tights, her slippers, her blouses, her talcum powder, and a thin paisley dressing-gown which Chrissie had known for more than twenty years. She folded the newly purchased evening dress and the newly purchased cocktail dress back into their shrouds of white tissue paper and laid them to rest. She parcelled up the string of cultured pearls from John Lewis on Oxford Street, the amber brooch which Chrissie had given her one Christmas, the golden chain which had been Grandma Bawtry’s, and the large opal ring which Joe had bought her on his visit to Ivy in Australia. The lace-edged handkerchiefs smelled of lavender and eau de Cologne. Chrissie sighed, but not with grief. It was the waste of it and the pity of it. The pity and the waste.
Chrissie thought it would be unseemly to take lunch in the restaurant, so she ate a tuna-and-cucumber sandwich in her cabin. In the afternoon, she slept, and woke from her sleep with a sense of levitation. Her body rose from thinly remembered dreams of childhood and seemed to hover over her bed. She lay there for a while, suspended, staring at the ceiling, wondering how to spend her last evening at sea. She was free, now, to go where she willed. She could drink a Manhattan or a White Lady, she could eat a rare steak or a plateful of fritters, she could visit the Casino or go in search of a gigolo. She could gamble away all her holiday money, or strike up conversations with strangers. She could ring Faro, and tell her the whole story. She could ring Nick Gaulden, and tell him his first mother-in-law was dead. Would this be the right moment to reopen the old wounds?
No, she would not ring Nick Gaulden. Only once more would she ring Nick Gaulden, and this was not to be the occasion. And she decided not to ring Faro. Or not yet. Ringing Faro seemed too easy an option. It had begun to occur to her that Faro might, when the time came, greet her own death with a similar light-headed relief. The dawning notion was a shock to her. Was she already a burden to Faro? How could she tell? Were all mothers a burden to their daughters, as fathers were to their sons? She had made Faro’s girlhood a muddle and at times a torment, and would one day soon be blamed for those maternal crimes. Chrissie thought about Faro every day and always. Should she have had more children, to disperse the love and the guilt?
As she disrobed herself from the towelling toga of her siesta, and selected a sober outfit of charcoal grey for her evening’s entertainments, Chrissie conjured up her daughter Faro. Faro, Chrissie considered, was doing well. Faro had written a thesis on evolutionary determinism. Faro was young and beautiful. Faro would go far. Faro had no clogs on her feet, no chains round her ankles. She would not stick fast. Would she? The Bawtrys would not claim her. Would they?
Chrissie clasped around her throat a silver necklet, and looked at herself in the mirror. Not bad, for a woman rapidly approaching fifty. Not all that good, but not all that bad.
She wondered whether news of her mother’s death had reached the whole of the crew, and whether watchful eyes would follow her. Should she brave a solitary meal at the table at which she and her mother had dined together, or should she chicken out and lie low? Pride drove her on, but discretion held her back. She was undecided. She had in the past boldly and with panache confronted so many embarrassments, so many humiliations. And a dead mother was surely neither an embarrassment nor a humiliation. But what would their waiter and their waitress think if she were to turn up alone at their table? Would they inquire about her mother’s absence? Bessie had held forth at them and chatted them up, as was her way, and they had responded politely, as was their job. They would be sure to inquire after her. Chrissie decided she could not face it, and in the next instant despised herself for the decision. She stood, irresolute, appalled by the triviality of her hesitation.
She wandered out, still undecided, and walked. She marched along corridors and up stairwells and down stairwells, discovering quarters she had not known existed—a noisy cafeteria, a bar got up to look like an English pub, a night club threatening a show band. She stopped in one of the unfamiliar bars and ordered herself a drink. It went straight to her head. She ordered another. She paid in dollar bills instead of signing the chit with her cabin number, and took herself, defiantly, to the dining room. Gaulden pride and Yorkshire thrift had conquered. She would not waste a meal she had paid for. Her mother couldn’t eat hers, but she wouldn’t want Chrissie to miss hers, would she?