All in the Mind (18 page)

Only once, on a particularly steep climb through a nearby village, did he get out of breath, but he just turned round and freewheeled back down the hill, taking an easier, longer route home. He put the bike in the garage and went upstairs to have a shower. He’d worked up a mild sweat, his legs were tired, and his arms ached a little from all the vibrations on the road, but once he’d washed and got dressed, he felt a glow every bit as warm as the one which followed sex with Madeleine. With time, he was sure it would match the post-Angela glow too.

15

It was mid morning before Sturrock finally managed to set off for the village of Coldicote to see his mother. Despite the fact that it must have been evident he was so tired he could hardly get out of bed, Stella had sent him to the supermarket first thing to buy some bits and pieces for Jack’s birthday lunch the next day. He really resented the way she set him little tasks on Saturday morning. It was her way of indicating that she didn’t think he made a sufficient contribution to domestic life. She knew he was usually exhausted on Saturdays, but nevertheless she always made her point, getting him to clean the car, trim the hedge, mow the lawn. He felt worn down by it. ‘Can’t she see,’ he said to himself as he turned onto the North Circular from the Chiswick Roundabout, ‘that far from bringing me closer to the family, it drives me away?’ He occasionally thought about saying so, but he could never face it.

He visited his mother in her care home once a week, partly out of duty, and a genuine fondness for her, but also as a way of getting out of the house for a good chunk of the weekend. Stella and his mother had never really got on, so Stella rarely came with him, unless it was a special occasion. On his mother’s last birthday, they’d taken her a present and a cake which Stella had bought at Marks & Spencer, but then taken out of the packaging and put in an old baking tin.

On a good day, it would take him just over an hour to get to the Grosvenor Vale Home for the Elderly, seven or eight miles from his childhood home in Hitchin. Every week, he said to himself he would go and take a look at their old house, but he never did.

He would often stop for a coffee on the way, and another on the
way
back, and with the hour he spent with his mother while he was there, he could eat up a very substantial part of the day. This morning, however, he decided to drive straight to the home. He was eager to get the visit over with, nervous about telling his mother about Aunt Jessica, and how she would react.

As he picked up speed on the A1, he wondered if the sight of his mother, and the inevitable talk of death and memories of the past, might turn his worsening mood into something more serious, sending him off into a plunge. Yet even as he wondered, he reflected how, usually, if he predicted that a specific event would cause a plunge, the plunge never came. Or if it did, it came later, when he was not expecting it.

He hoped his mother would be in her room when he got there, not downstairs where the old people sat for part of the day in a semicircle, chairs pointed towards some inane daytime TV programme. He couldn’t bear to see her just staring at the TV, occasionally looking round when she heard some of the other residents laughing at what the presenter was saying, she a woman whose intellect he had always admired, and who had taught him so much. The chances were she would be downstairs though, as it would be close to midday by the time he arrived, and they liked to get them down for lunch if they were mobile.

He parked behind a builder’s van, walked in to the smell of old age, cleaning fluids and institutional cooking, signed himself in and took the lift to the third floor. Even though he suspected she would be in the ground-floor main lounge, not in her room, he was letting his hopes take him where they led him. As he walked down the corridor to her room, he bumped into her being wheeled towards the lift.

‘Oh, look who’s here, Sheila,’ said one of the nurses. ‘It’s your little lad Martin.’ His mother’s head was lolling forward and sideways, but she managed to straighten a little and there was at least the hint of a smile when she saw him.

‘That’s nice, isn’t it, Sheila?’ said the nurse, who spoke very loudly and very slowly, as if, thought Sturrock, she was speaking to a deaf
child
. He didn’t much like the home, or the staff, but he could hardly criticise. They looked after his mother every day of the week, which was more than he did. Shortly after his father died, he had suggested to Stella they build a granny-flat extension in Chiswick, but Stella rightly said she would end up looking after Sheila because he would be busy looking after his patients, and it wasn’t fair to expect
her
to look after
his
mother.

‘I’ll tell you what, Sheila,’ the nurse went on. ‘It’s about forty minutes to lunch so why don’t we wheel you back to your room? That way, you and Martin can have a nice chat, and then he can bring you down for lunch with your friends.’

‘Allow me,’ said Sturrock, taking the handles of the wheelchair.

Back in her room, he wasn’t sure whether to lift her out of her wheelchair into the worn velveteen armchair in which she spent most of her waking time. It seemed a lot of effort.

‘Shall I put you back in your chair?’ he asked, hoping she would say no. She didn’t answer. ‘Perhaps best to leave you where you are, then, rather than lift you out now only to have to lift you back again when you go downstairs for lunch.’

When he told her, quite matter-of-factly, that Aunt Jessica had died, she remained impassive, so it was difficult to know what she felt. That had always been the problem with his mother, he thought. She didn’t like to betray her feelings. Perhaps it had been a reaction to living with his father, who tended to seize on any display of emotion as a sign of weakness. Whatever the reason, it had always annoyed him. He’d wanted to have a mother who laughed and cried, rather than one who met all events, be they happy or sad, with the same measured attitude. ‘I’m going to become a psychiatrist, Mum.’ ‘If you think it’s the right thing to do, that’s fine.’ ‘I’ve just been appointed a government adviser.’ ‘Well, I’m sure you’ve worked hard for it.’ ‘I fell out with Aunt Jessica because she sided with Dad when we had an argument, and I knew she actually agreed with me.’ ‘Oh, Martin, there really is no point falling out over that!’ She had been a fiercely intelligent woman and he knew she felt things deeply, she just never let him in.

‘Simon said it was a release in the end,’ he said. ‘She had been getting very confused, and he said she was suddenly very weak.’

His mother nodded, and gave him a little smile.

‘You’re still here though,’ he said, picking up on what the smile and the watery eyes were trying to tell him.

‘Still here,’ she said. ‘Just.’

‘You’ll be here a while yet,’ he said.

There was a fairly long lull before he said, ‘The funeral is on Tuesday, in Somerset. I don’t suppose you can go, what do you think?’

He was conscious of loading the question in a manner designed to elicit the reaction he was hoping for, namely that she would say she was not strong enough to travel, as it would complicate his day even more if he had to take her.

‘I should go,’ she said. ‘I think it would mean a lot to your father.’

Even accepting his disappointment at the answer, Sturrock felt dubious that his mother’s attendance at the funeral would have meant anything much to his father, who had shown little regard for Aunt Jessica when she was alive. His mother was doing what everyone did when confronted with death, saying what she thought she ought to say. It was the same sentiment that had led to the glowing tributes made to his father on his death. Martin had read them all, including the obituary in
The Times
. He hardly recognised the man they described. They set out places he had lived, jobs he had done, professional achievements, but said nothing about what kind of person he was. The only reference to his family was in the final sentence of the little piece in
The Times
: ‘
He is survived by his widow Sheila, and a son and daughter
.’ That was it. George Sturrock’s contribution to a new style of bridge in Morocco, which had a whole paragraph, was deemed more important than his life as a husband and a father. Yet as people came up to him at the funeral, touched his arm and said how sorry they were, and he nodded in silent appreciation of their sentiments, they were doing so because they assumed he was feeling the deep loss of someone he loved and who loved him in return. In truth, he was feeling the deep loss of a love there had never really been. When ordering the headstone, his mother asked that they put ‘engineer,
husband
, father’. At one point, Jan suggested putting ‘loving’ before husband and father, but he and his mother felt it wouldn’t flow. ‘Engineer, loving husband and father’ sounded awkward. And you couldn’t say ‘loving’ before ‘engineer’. So ‘loving’ was dropped, and he had felt pleased at that. George Sturrock was indeed an engineer, a husband and father. They were facts. He was not loving, at least not till the end, when, in Sturrock’s mind, he had demonstrated affection merely in the hope he would get a late pass to Paradise rather than Hell and damnation.

His mother looked tired now, and her head was beginning to fall to her chest. He knew it wouldn’t be long before her funeral too. He loved her much more than he had ever loved his father. Yet he doubted he would shed as many tears as he had then.

The thought of his father’s grave aroused in him a fresh wave of anxiety about the eulogy he was supposed to deliver on Tuesday. He had spent his professional career helping people to see the best in themselves and yet he had difficulty seeing the best in Aunt Jessica. For years, he had loved her, perhaps as the emotional mother he never had. One lunchtime argument had changed that for ever. Ever since, she had seemed to him a weak woman – someone who pretended to have independence of spirit but was in fact as awed as the rest of them by his father’s bullying authority.

Downstairs, he could hear the bell ringing, announcing that lunch was ready. He wheeled his mother towards the lift, longing to be back in the car, alone.

16

Ralph Hall was feeling very pleased with himself as the train pulled into Newcastle station, and he stepped on to the platform, virtually sober. Throughout the three-hour journey, he had managed to limit himself to a couple of the tiny bottles of white wine from the complimentary drinks trolley which, taken as an accompaniment to a late breakfast of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, seemed to have gone unnoticed by his fellow passengers. For the first hour of the journey, he ploughed through a boxful of paperwork. Once the effects of his hangover had worn off, he whizzed through it, congratulating himself on the speed with which he was able to dispatch work. Over the years, he had developed a fairly acute sense of what was important and what was not simply from glancing at the paperwork. Like people, some papers looked more important than others. He sometimes felt bad when he dismissed a complicated position paper in a matter of seconds. He would skim-read it before rushing to the final paragraph in bold at the end, which would ask him to make a decision, yes or no, agree or disagree, and he would tick or circle and move on. His box also contained letters whose authors had agonised over every word, thinking deeply, consulting widely, and then sending them off with enormous hope in their hearts that he would agree with their proposal or argument, or accept their invitation to speak at the event they were planning. Yet such letters often came to the minister with a squiggled one-line interpretation and recommendation at the top, penned by a private secretary, and Ralph would tick yes or no and that was that. He was rushing more than usual today because
he
also had his homework from Professor Sturrock which he was determined to get done before the weekend was out.

Professor Sturrock had asked him to write two separate lists, one on the left-hand side of the page, the other on the right. On the left-hand side, he had to write sentences beginning ‘I want’. On the right, sentences beginning ‘I need’. They did not have to be obvious pairs. Indeed, he could write five successive wants for every need if he so chose, though the Professor said it was probably best to aim for a similar number of each. He told him not to rule out anything that came into his mind. ‘I want world peace’ was no more or less important, to the psychiatrist, than ‘I need a bar of chocolate’.

The carriage was less than half full, and Ralph had managed to get a table to himself, so once his box was done, and his scrambled eggs played with and pushed to one side, he settled down to it.

He took out his A4 pad and drew a reasonably straight line down the middle of the page. He wrote a small w on the left of the page, a small n on the right. Professor Sturrock had told him he must put down his thoughts as they came, but Ralph was not happy with the first want that came into his head – ‘I want to be Prime Minister.’ He looked out of the window. A farmer was leaning against a tractor, drawing on a cigarette. The farmer was gone. Will I ever see that farmer again? he asked himself. Probably not. As the green fields sped by, he wondered how many of them belonged to the farmer he had seen. Or perhaps he was a mere labourer, paid a lowly wage to tend the land and do the farmer’s bidding.

Ralph forced his gaze back to the A4 pad. He realised he was deliberately turning his mind away from the task in hand as a way of avoiding dealing with the simple fact that, when he began to analyse his needs and wants, ‘I want to be Prime Minister’ was the first thing that came to mind. He wondered about starting again, so that he would not have to deal with Professor Sturrock making too much of such a clear and unequivocal statement, but then the Professor’s words came back into his mind: ‘It’s important to be honest, and to be open to whatever comes in. If you’re not honest and open, we’ll be wasting our time.’

He looked around him for one last check that nobody could see what he was writing, and committed the thought to paper. ‘I want to be Prime Minister.’ Nothing wrong with that, he thought. Plenty of people in Parliament thought he might be up to it. Every now and then, his name popped up in media speculation, albeit usually towards the end of a fairly long list. His son told him the bookies had him at 33–1, but that was before the new man came in, and he would have lengthened by now.