Dolly (15 page)

‘Time you found work, Jane,’ she would say. ‘Time you brought some money in. Not that you need it, of course.’ This remark would be followed by a little laugh, which contained both resentment and anticipation, for it became clear to me that she regarded herself as my mother’s eventual legatee, by which time I would have a job which would satisfy my modest needs and make me providentially self-sufficient. Since I was so deficient in sexual attraction, her argument might have gone, I could be relegated to that unfortunate sub-species which devoted itself to getting on with the world’s work. I would no doubt wear cardigans and flat shoes, and Dolly could safely wash her hands of me, since I had proved to be so backward in taking her advice.

Oddly enough my mother did not read between the lines of Dolly’s concern but chose to trust only that part of it which was genuine. For there was a certain rough affection there, for my mother at least, although this affection was mixed with an almost intolerable condescension, which my mother would not have recognised even if it had been brought to her notice. She seemed to regard Dolly as a source of life, the life which was no longer permitted to her
to enjoy, and on Sunday evenings she would rouse herself from her almost permanent position in a corner of the sofa and go into my father’s study to telephone Dolly. I would hear the vigorous clacking of Dolly’s voice, interspersed with my mother’s wistful interrogations. As far as I could judge Dolly was as perfunctory as ever in enquiring after my mother, regarding the fact that she was on the other end of the telephone as sufficient proof of her concern. She had almost no curiosity, and like many obtuse people prided herself on her knowledge of human nature. She was certainly conversant with the murkier wellsprings of natural conduct. Thus she never asked me any questions more searching than whether I had found work or boyfriends, preferably both. When I purposely offered a blank face and a negative reply she would turn away in something like disgust.

For this reason I preferred to spend the remainder of that summer in Marigold’s house, where her great-aunts were in monumental but ever-active residence, spring-cleaning the bedrooms over the family’s protestations, turning out daily batches of delicious cakes, willing to cook chips for Marigold’s brother Oliver if he came in looking hungry, or sometimes, formidably arrayed, having a day in town, which meant a day at Selfridges, from which they returned by public transport, despite being weighed down by several shopping bags. These excellent women regarded me with the deepest concern, which I found shamefully acceptable, since it was accompanied by a desire for my wellbeing which I no longer found at home. ‘Sit down, dear,’ Kate or Nell would say. ‘Marigold, give Jane that wee cushion for her back. Will you take a scone, Jane?’ To take was their favourite verb, although
no two people could have been more giving. ‘Will you take a cup of tea, Mary?’ was a question regularly put to Marigold’s mother when she came home from school. ‘Will I put the kettle on?’ By the same token one of them might remark to the other, ‘I hear Mrs Wishart took another stroke,’ to which Kate or Nell might reply, ‘Poor wee thing,’ although the Mrs Wishart in question might have been seventy-five years old and a menace to her unfortunate neighbours.

They were such good women, so tireless on everyone’s behalf, so blameless in pursuit of their duty. Even when exhausted by a day’s shopping, and resting swollen ankles on small footstools, they congratulated everyone on their time well spent. ‘Such a good day,’ they would reassure their nephew, Marigold’s father, as he sat becalmed by further scones. ‘We managed to match those pillowcases at Selfridges. We took our lunch there.’ This meant that they had eaten their lunch there, not that they had carried it in with them. ‘Have you had a sufficiency, Peter?’ Swallowing a last mouthful of superfluous scone, their nephew would assure them that he had. ‘Then we’ll away to bed. Just give me that cup and plate, Mary. No, no, Nell will put them under the tap. Will you be taking anything more this evening? No? Then we’ll away to bed. Goodnight, then.’

It was a giant step from this affecting cordiality to the new loneliness of my home, where my mother sat virtually silent in the corner of the sofa. For a time I endured this with her, until my natural energies reasserted themselves. Then I devoted myself to cheering her up, and for a while, a brief blessed interval in our reduced life together, I succeeded. In
this I was greatly aided by television, that friend of lonely hearts, that comfort of the oppressed and the depressed. In the daytime, when I knew she was safe with Miss Lawlor, who would see that she ate lunch, I was free to roam around London, with or without Marigold: in the evening I would ask her, ‘Is there anything good on tonight?’ ‘Jane does so love television,’ I heard her tell John Pickering, who came to see us from time to time. He looked at me strangely, as if he understood my manoeuvres. ‘I watch for her sake, really. As you know, John, my husband only cared for the news, and sometimes not even for that. We listened to music, mostly. But Jane is young; she needs a brighter life than the one I can give her. And sometimes the programmes are quite entertaining.’ For her sake I sat through game shows and quizzes, in which she seemed to take an innocent delight. This disturbed me, as if I had detected an advancing puerility. I kept a watch on this, and at times of lowered morale, or when I was very tired, my suspicions were confirmed. My mother seemed to go straight from one condition to another, from the obedient debility of the daytime, when she would creep about the flat, exchanging mild words with Miss Lawlor, to the factitious excitement of the evening, when she could look forward to entertainment at a level which made no demands on her and which all too frequently treated her as the child she was fast becoming.

I would get home at about six o’clock to find a lavish meal prepared for me. I would be bustled into the kitchen, as if there were little time to lose. A plate of chicken stew or some elaborate casserole would be put down in front of me, while my mother went into the drawing-room to switch on the television,
as if my homecoming were merely a pretext or a signal, after which she could enjoy the rest of the evening undisturbed. But this is not quite fair: she would make the odd journey into the kitchen to see if I were enjoying my dinner. At these times there was a look of girlish love on her face. ‘Is it nice, darling? Violet and I thought you needed something hot after your day out.’ This referred to my idle and almost unbearably aimless day, which my mother chose to believe was an honourable occupation, in much the same way that my father had left home for the bank in the morning and returned at six in the evening. My timetabling therefore reassured her, although the day was as often as not spent in the National Gallery or the British Museum, or simply wandering over vast tracts of London, as if seeking another home. It was at times like these that I would wonder how I would manage to live the rest of my life, for even getting a job seemed to be beyond me, as was any other kind of realistic endeavour. I was sore at heart and fatalistic; my main preoccupation was my mother’s state of mind, and I held myself in readiness in case she should need me. And yet my anxiety was so great that I had to leave the flat in the morning, and the diversions I thought I could legitimately award myself would calm me sufficiently to ensure an equable return and the faintly sinister evening that awaited me.

My mother’s mental state alarmed me. In this way I was able to overlook her physical state, which was not good. By living such a reduced life she was able to contain her condition, and never referred to it. In this she was like my father, who only confessed to illness when it had become too conspicuous to ignore. My mother rarely left the flat; I had no
idea what she did all day. My own survival depended on my being absent. When I returned in the late afternoon or the early evening I found her buoyed up merely because the day would soon be at an end and she could retire to bed. I see now that she did battle all the time with her failing heart. She complained of the cold, although the weather was mild and the flat well heated. It did not occur to me that her brain was being slowly starved of oxygen. What I thought of as her increasing childishness had a physical cause, but because it made her so easy to please I did not question it. Her odd exaggerated excitement, which would collapse all at once into trembling fatigue, I put down to the change wrought by grief. I thought that she would eventually return to normal; in the meantime I joined her in her little distractions, which were harmless. It cost me a certain amount to do so; I was aware of something unusual in her behaviour. Yet I wanted her to be happy, and there was enough loving communion in our moods, however disparate, to satisfy us both. We loved each other. Neither of us wanted to disappoint or to give pain.

My mother prepared for me an elaborate meal in order to disguise the fact that she ate nothing herself. After a cup of tea and a biscuit with Miss Lawlor she thankfully renounced the task of eating until the following morning. This was not too serious; she had had lunch; she was therefore nourished. What was more worrying was the primacy of entertainment, with which eating dinner could only interfere. She would settle herself with anticipation in her corner of the sofa, sometimes having run a comb through her hair and put on a little lipstick in honour of the ceremony, while I sat in the
kitchen, stolidly eating the heavy food which I no longer wanted. I would have thrown it away, were it not for the lightning visits my mother paid to see the gratifying look of appreciation on my face. For that was what she now required: appeasement, reassurance. She ardently desired to have no more serious preoccupations than the choice between one serial and another, although in reality she preferred programmes which made no demands on her at all. Thus through the kitchen wall I would hear a cacophony of pop music or the triumphant catch phrases of a compère or quiz master. Sometimes, most terrible of all, I would hear my mother laugh with delight and thus become one with the moronic audience. She might pay a further visit to the kitchen as I slowly washed up. ‘Aren’t you coming to watch?’ she would ask. ‘Aren’t you coming to watch the show?’ For the unbroken stream of programmes had become ‘the show’, and she had become infinitely younger, almost a girl again, and reacting as children do when taken to the pantomime at Christmas.

My heart broke for her, although she seemed oddly happy. Grimly I took up my position next to her on the sofa, until I saw that she was tired, although she protested that she was not. In this way she believed that she was neither tired nor hungry, even when her eyelids were drooping with fatigue and her thin hands were restless in her lap. ‘Come on,’ I would say. ‘I’m sleepy, even if you aren’t,’ and I would get up and switch off the set. This was the signal for her to come down to earth; a tired or painful smile would replace the factitious enthusiasm which had greeted me at my homecoming, and for a brief interval we looked into each other’s eyes
with total understanding. ‘I’ll come and see you to say goodnight,’ I would assure her, and indeed those colloquies which took place in her bedroom, while she lay becalmed in the big double bed which my parents had always shared, constitute my most precious memories of that unhappy time, although in retrospect I see that I came to treasure even the memory of her eager face at the kitchen door, and her artless question, ‘Aren’t you coming to watch the show?’

In the morning she would once again be the woman who had been married to my father, neat and correct, as she always was, but now weary, as if beset with problems. In fact she was beset with memories, which did not appear to give her pleasure. ‘I shouldn’t have insisted on going to the Isle of Wight,’ she said. ‘Paul wanted to go back to Étretat, but I thought you were too small. I was frightened of the rocks.’ Another time she said, ‘That case of vintage champagne is for you. It is for when you get married. He put it down when you were born.’ Or again, and more worryingly, ‘That was a lovely concert at the Wigmore Hall, the one when I met your father. Such a pity you couldn’t have heard it.’ But when I got up to go, picking up some vague approximation to a briefcase, she got up with a smile on her face and kissed me, for all the world as if I were my father and she were seeing me off to work. I would wait until Miss Lawlor had taken off her hat and coat, and when I heard the comfortable murmur of what seemed like normal conversation, I would make my escape, striding out with gratitude into the increasingly misty mornings, away from the dread which afflicted me at home, and into the reassuring bustle of the working world.

I was grateful that we had no visitors, or that when we did,
as when John Pickering looked in once or twice a month, my mother behaved normally. Indeed I think she was normal, but was subject to the abnormal states which follow the loss of the one who has given one’s life its meaning. From being repressed and overlooked as a girl my mother had been awoken to life by my father: I truly think that my birth was of lesser importance to her than my father’s wellbeing, although they both loved me dearly. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I resembled my father, with his pale hair and aquiline face, so that my mother, in looking at me, was constantly reminded of him. At no time was my mother deluded or deranged, but she had the deep sadness and the childish gaiety that prefigure derangement. I trusted John Pickering to be discreet, to pick up only those signals which he alone could discern, without any corroboration from myself. When I saw him to the door after these visits we did not indulge in those whispered consultations which turn the one left in the other room into an unwitting patient. He did not even ask me if I could manage, for which I was grateful. For after all I could manage. I was managing. But all the time I was aware of the silence of the flat, a silence broken only by the witless jingles of television commercials, which my mother particularly appreciated. I was aware of the relief with which I left the flat every morning, and of my watchfulness when I returned to it in the evening. When I was particularly downhearted I even thought of invoking the help of Dolly, but when I got round to telephoning her, from a public call box, there was no reply, not even from Annie, and I was forced to assume that she had gone back to Brussels for a visit, perhaps to dear
Adèle Rougier, with whom Dolly was once again on the best of terms.