Jerusalem the Golden (28 page)

‘And is it bad?’ said Clara, gazing intently at the television.

‘She’ll be lucky,’ said Alan, with a kind of dreadful satisfaction, ‘she’ll be lucky if she lasts three months.’

And Clara, hearing it, knew that she had from the first expected to hear it, for what did telegrams mean but death? Not, in her family, births or greetings or weddings or events or excitements, but death itself, quite simply so. Nothing else was worth so extravagant a gesture, so expensive an announcement.

‘Oh,’ she said.

And warming a little to his theme, Alan continued, ‘They say there’s no hope, no hope at all, there’s nothing they can do for her. It’s far too far gone, they said.’

Clara, listening to his tone, felt herself filling slowly with repugnance, for his tone was so grim, so emphatic, so much an inheritance from that dying woman; and she thought to herself, she bred it in him, how can she complain if her death is so received?

‘Cancer of what?’ she said, knowing that she had got him on to a subject on which he might well be expansive, and thinking that she might as well know; and he told her, he told her everything, with such emotionless self-congratulation that she finally could take it no longer, and interrupted him, and said,

‘No, no, that’s quite enough, I daresay I’ll have to hear it all over again in the morning.’

And so he told her whom to ask for at the hospital, and the number of their mother’s ward, and then he left her.

And then she found herself alone in the house. She had not been alone in it, thus, in the evening, for many years, for her mother never went out, and she felt, in her solitude, that her mother was already dead. She walked, restlessly, downstairs, from room to room, opening the cupboards, looking at the sad, much-hated objects of her infancy, the tulip-patterned slop bowl, the plastic mats, the easy chairs, the narrow bulging settee, the tiled fireplace, the plastic pulley in the kitchen, where a few abandoned tea towels still hung. It frightened her to think how much violence she had wasted upon such harmless things. What chance had there ever been, ever, that she would have been condemned to them for life? What immense folly had ever made her fear such a fate? It was nearly over; the house was about to expire, it would be taken to pieces and there would be nothing left of it.

After a while she went upstairs and thought she would have a bath, but the water was cold; her mother, provident even in illness, had switched off the immersion heater before her departure. So she went into her bedroom and started to undress, but anxiousness possessed her so much that she could not make herself get into the blanketed bed, and the sight of the empty room, with its ugly furniture and its bare primrose walls and its small narrow divan disturbed her so much, with so many recollections of the sufferings of her childhood, that she left it, and started to walk up and down the short
corridor, up and down, and finally she wandered into her mother’s bedroom, and stood there in its emptiness, staring, bemused, at the satin-covered bed. And she felt, as she stood there, that she was facing the room for the first time, no longer averting her own eyes from her own shame before it, no longer blind with vicarious grief, no longer clouded by the menace of her own lack of love. None of it had any longer any importance, and she looked at the bed, and at the wardrobe, and at the flowered, worn carpet with its ill-assorted rugs and mats, and then she went and sat down at the dressing table, and looked at herself in her mother’s mirror. Then she started, methodically, assiduously, to open all the little pots and boxes, gazing earnestly at rings and hairpins, at bits of cotton wool and old bus tickets, and then she moved on, to the drawers themselves, to piles of stockings and handkerchiefs, still searching, looking anxiously for she knew not what, for some small white powdery bones, for some ghost of departed life. And in the bottom drawer, beneath a bundle of underwear, she found it. She found some old exercise books, and some photographs done up with a rubber band.

She took them out, and spread them on the dusty glass-topped table, and looked at them. She looked at the photographs first; they were old and brown and faded, and some of them she had seen before, for some were of weddings and birthday gatherings, but there were two that she had never seen. They were both of her mother, her mother alone, her mother aged twenty, and in both her mother sat on a fence in the country somewhere, with a bicycle propped against her skirts, and in one she stared gravely at the camera from beneath her cloche, and in the other she smiled bravely, gaily, a smile radiant with hope and intimacy, at the unseen hands holding the unseen, long-derelict camera. She looked thin and frail and tender, quite lacking the rigid misery that seized her face on the wedding photographs; Clara had never in her life seen such a look upon her face. She stared at them with a kind of wonder, and then she put them back in their rubber band, and started to look at the exercise books.

They were stiff-backed, and black, and inside they were lined, and covered with thin blue ink, in her mother’s hand. She started to read,
and at first she could not think what she was reading. One page started: ‘It was a bitterly cold day, and Annabella, staring from her narrow attic window, shivered and held her hands towards the solitary candle.’ The text was heavily emendated, heavily crossed out, and from time to time there were pages written out as verse; one of them said:

O let us seek a brighter world

Where darkness plays no part:

and another started with the verse:

I wait here for my life, and here I must wait

While all the world rolls on and passes by;

Surely my expectations have a date,

And I will find the answer ere I die?

And Clara, reading this, started to shiver, for she knew that she was reading her mother’s life, and that if ever she had needed proof that she had once lived, then this was it. And she turned to the end of the book, and there was the date, 1925; before her mother’s marriage, before the end of her hopes. And Clara began to cry, for she could not bear the thought of so much deception, of so much disappointment, of a life so eked and spent and drawn and withered away. She would have preferred to believe that hope had never existed, that there had been no error, no waste, no loss, and yet there it lay, in those faded stilted phrases, in those tenuous and stiffened smiles. It was possible, then, to go disastrously astray; tragedy was possible, survival was no certainty, there was no reason why anyone should escape. And Clara looked back at the writing, and at its shockingly literate echoes of stories and hymns long since forgotten, and she could bear to read no more, and she wondered whether she should fall on her knees and thank Battersby Grammar School and the Welfare State and Gabriel Denham and the course of time, or whether she should reserve her gratitude until more safe and later days.

And she put the exercise books back in the drawer, carefully,
where she had found them, and then she went back to her own bedroom, and got into bed between the rough blankets, too tired to look for sheets, and as she fell asleep she noticed in herself a sense of shocked relief, for she was glad to have found her place of birth, she was glad that she had however miserably pre-existed, she felt, for the first time, the satisfaction of her true descent.

In the morning, she got up and went to the hopital, as she had been told, and found the specialist, as she had been instructed, and he told her the whole story, and told it with a kind of bluntness that paid little respect to whatever feelings she might have had. He seemed to be saying to her, beneath his lines: Plain dealing is what you expect, plain dealing is what you will get, we are no fools, you and I, and how useful that neither of us has time for sentiment. She found him offensive, though she could see that he meant to soothe, that he meant to invite her into a dry and stoic world; she wondered how many emotions he had disarmed and strangled at their timid, delicate, hysteric birth. His lack of circumspection pained her, for she had grown used to the circumspect, and she would have preferred a veneer of sympathy, no matter what indifference it might have covered, for she felt herself forever alienated from this world where brutality presented itself as sincerity. She disliked his dreadful suggestion of conspiracy, his suggestion that nobody cared, that death was a necessity, that an appearance of caring would be merely a mockery and a pretence. And when he said, finally,

‘She’ll be all right here with us, there’s no reason to think of moving her, whatever she says, because after all you’ve got your own life to live, you won’t want to be looking after her yourself, let’s face it, will you?’ She found herself almost forced into revolt, upon the verge of declaring that she could, finally, precisely, face just that, the final, often imagined (and yet how final, and therefore possibly endurable) martyrdom: but she looked at him, at his square face, and his heavy glasses, and his knowing look, and her eyes dropped because of course she could not face it, he was right, he knew the limits of human effort better than she herself had known them, for he had seen them more often than she had.

‘No,’ she said, meekly, ‘no, I couldn’t stay here, I have to be back in London, I couldn’t stay, I really couldn’t stay …’

And he led her, thus defeated, to her mother. She was in a small ward, curtained off from two other patients, and when Clara was shown into the room she was dozing, her head propped up upon the high mound of hospital pillow, her jaw sagging, breathing through her mouth. She looked appalling; the change was worse than anything Clara had ever imagined, and she could not believe that in so little time so much flesh could have worn itself away. It was only two months since she had seen her, and she had come to this. The bones of the head, once sunk deep, now reached forth through the skin to their final revelation, and the breath disturbed the body, as though it caused it pain. Clara, staring, in the instant before her mother stirred and woke, wondered how she could not have known, how she could have missed the warnings of this imminent decay. And she felt that she was standing there empty-handed, bringing nothing, useless; in a jug by the bedside a few roses withered, and she thought, at least I could have brought her flowers. And she was the more ashamed because she had thought of bringing flowers, she had passed, on the way there, a dozen flowershops, and had not stopped, because she had been afraid, afraid of rejection, afraid of that sour smile with which so many years ago her mother had received her small offerings of needle cases and cross-stitch pin cushions and laboriously gummed and assembled calendars. She had been afraid of the gesture; she had learned nothing, she could not give, and yet she knew that without gestures there was no hope that love might fill the empty frames, the extended arms, the social kisses, the proffered flowers. She had brought nothing, and her meanness dismayed her. She had not wished to be mean.

When her mother woke, she sat up, abruptly, and looked at Clara, evidently forewarned, and looked her in the eye, and said, bitterly, sourly, without interrogation,

‘Oh, so you’ve come then, have you.’

‘Yes,’ said Clara, standing there nervously, uneasily.

For some time neither of them spoke, and then her mother said, fretfully,

‘Sit down, go on, sit down, there’s a chair there somewhere, isn’t there, you might as well sit down.’

So Clara sat.

‘I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me why you didn’t come any earlier,’ said her mother, after another long pause.

And Clara, who had been toying with the idea of saying, I was in Paris with a man, as some desperate final appeal to that young woman leaning on a gate forty years ago, found naturally that such an appeal was impossible, against nature; and equally impossible was the only other possible reply, which would have been to answer this dull uninflected demand in kind, by saying, ‘No, I am not going to tell you.’ Freedom abandoned her, the pitiful ineptitude of freedom, and she found herself once more, as of old, basely prevaricating, terrified into deceit, mumbling shamefully on about examinations, and having been away on a course, and not having received messages.

Then her mother, who had been looking down at her sheet, and picking at the hem of it with an unfamiliar feebleness, said suddenly with all her ancient venom,

‘If I were on my deathbed, it would be all the same to you lot. What do you care? I work my fingers to the bone, and what do you care? If I were on my deathbed, you wouldn’t care. If I dropped dead, you’d walk over my dead body.’

And Clara, telling herself that she had heard these phrases, word for word, a hundred times before, and that hardly a mother in the world had not been driven to them, could nevertheless not restrain a kind of sick shivering, for she knew, then, that her mother knew, and was thus obliquely imparting her terror and her information. For she too was not after all lacking in circumspection: she too could multiply implications. And knowledge lay between them, dourly, without comfort, inarticulate.

After a while they started to talk, laboriously, of other things; of the immersion heater and the laundry and the milk bill. Clara, listening, sustaining her part, dispelled the hope, which had sprung in her the night before, that some reconciliation, some gleams of sympathy or need might show themselves, and she saw, as she had always
known, that understanding is never anything but fitful; indeed, she found herself watching anxiously, fearfully, for any sign of feeling, for any chink in the stony front, because it was in truth the last thing that she wanted, the last thing that she could have borne. And there was nothing, nothing at all: with relief she saw that there would be nothing, that she would not be called upon to give, that she could merely answer meanness with meanness. When they started to talk, after some time, of Clara’s plans, Mrs Maugham herself like the doctor prefaced her remarks by the assumption that Clara’s only desire would be to get back to London as quickly as she could: Clara demurred, denied, postponed, and admitted.

‘I’ll stay for a day or two,’ she found herself saying, ‘and I’ll come back next weekend, I’ll come back on the Friday evening train …’